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.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
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.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
NOTHING HAPPENED IN OCTOBER
The True History of Lupin Lodge
The True History of Lupin Lodge
A nudist resort fallen on hard times is the setting for this magical-realist journal-novel about quirky characters and their struggles for respect and power, proving once again that truth is stranger than fiction.
Read it free, then pay me, if you like, whatever you think it is worth.
For a printable (Microsoft Word) file, e-mail a request to bobxtm@yahoo.com and I'll send it as an attachment.
chapter 1
NOTHING HAPPENED IN OCTOBER
The True History of Lupin Lodge
And there were many other things the Lupinites said and did, so that if all of them were recorded, the world could scarce contain all the books that would be written, but these things are written that ye may believe... or not believe, see if I care
The original Lupin Lodge building, not where the Restaurant/Clubhouse is now, but lower down the hill, near where now stands the big yurt called the Nudome, which is the only structure visible, since every other building is screened by all the trees, when you look over the Lupin grounds from up on Lupin Overlook, was built around 1850. Nobody is really sure if it was called "Lupin Lodge" back then, or if not, when that name might have come to be attached to it. A "lupin" is a showy stack of flowers, purple in color here although there are other hues further east, that grows in many parts of California, but in few parts of the Lupin grounds. Perhaps lupins were once pervasive here. One version is that the Lupin Lodge was originally a roadhouse, but as with so many things I hear here, I am doubtful. Maureen has a book on the history of Route 17, that supremely annoying and dangerous pseudo-freeway that crosses the Santa Cruz mountains, which goes back to the beginning and describes all the twisty and tortuous roads that were cut through, just before and just after the US acquired California, and Lupin is way off those routes. Mountain Charlie's Road would have been the closest, back then. There is still a section of "Mt. Charlie Road" preserved, now paved, and a Christmas tree farm draws customers up there in December. I passed Mt. Charlie Road nearly every day, when I commuted down to Cabrillo College by Old Santa Cruz and Soquel-San Jose roads, to avoid the maniacs on Route 17 who thought the speed-limit signs were just kidding when they said 50. And a couple days after I read Maureen's book, a tree-fall blocked Old Santa Cruz, so I took Mt. Charlie Road to get around.
It seemed steep and dangerous, scarce suitable for driving even now. In Mountain Charlie's day, most wagons had to be disassembled to get them up and down some of the stretches. And so it is hard to imagine there were enough travellers in the 1850's to support a roadhouse at a place that was not even on the semi-beaten track but miles off it, in Aldercroft. Aldercroft, though vaguely marked on some maps, with no particular boundaries, does not officially exist even today. It has never been an incorporated town or had businesses of the kind that might threaten to turn it into a town, nor has it even been a township, and the post office calls it a part of Los Gatos, though it is far above the city limits, up among the little streams, mostly dry in summer, that feed Los Gatos Creek, which is now dammed up to form the Lexington Reservoir. One of the ridges through the Aldercroft area, though nobody seems sure exactly which, was the one the Spaniards originally called Cuesta de los Gatos, giving the creek and then the city their names. The city of Los Gatos proper, ironically, never was visited by the big cats, though it used to have occasional problems with grizzly bears until they were all hunted out. But we do have a little pride of mountain lions that have started ranging over the Up Top area of the Lupin grounds, from Sal's Canyon next door. Paul the biologist collared them all, but the male's collar is broken, or he has shrugged it off, it hardly matters which, for no matter what, we can be sure he would never wander very far from the females. The trail from Tiger Lily yurt to the bathroom/shower structure called the Taj Mahal, in ironic tribute to its luxury, compared to the outhouses it replaced, had no working lights from the October typhoon through the end of the year, and the male lion annexed that trail to his hunting grounds, killing a deer and then a raccoon there, so I stopped walking that way when I rose before sunup.
In short, Aldercroft, however breath-takingly beautiful, is a boondock. It is about a half-hour drive down to Santa Cruz, a little more on the back roads or a little less if you brave Route 17, and a similar time to go the other way into the bustle of Silicon Valley, but up here the human presence is light, and the development restrictions imposed on the watershed of the Reservoir keep it that way. At night I see a few lights in the mountains, one at the very tippy-top of the ridge which I mistook for a planet at first, and when I pointed it out to someone, perhaps it was Big White Sambo, he argued with me that it really was a planet, until I finally persuaded him it was a house. Have I mentioned that it is breath-takingly beautiful here? At night there are many more stars visible than a city boy is accustomed to: Orion's penis is elongated to three stars, and the seven sisters in the Pleiades appear to have invited some cousins over. At dawn the deer often graze on the lawn between the Restaurant and the Oaktree Circle, where I sit with my coffee and my inevitable cigarettes, watching the fog bank from Santa Cruz creep over the mountains and threaten, like the Blob, to come down and swallow us, which rarely it does. I have counted as many as eight deer on the lawn at once, though Maureen says her personal record is fourteen. Raccoons are abundant, and once early in my stay here, when I saw a vicious animal stirring up the cats and skunks, I thought it was a badger, but I was told there is no species like a badger around these parts, and it must just have been a raccoon in a feisty mood. As with so much that I hear at Lupin, I was doubtful.
The Lupin grounds are sacred land. I felt this from the first, and so I was not surprised to hear how it was discovered that the place had been sacred to the Natives. As they were digging up and reshaping the ground to grade the road by the front office, the backhoe struck a large object, at first hard to identify, which proved to be the remains of a bull, buried in an upright rearing posture with some grave goods, centuries ago: a bull of what species I do not know, since we are very far away from anywhere that buffalo ever ranged, and the white man's cattle were not here then, perhaps a bull elk then. As with so much that I hear at Lupin, the details are fuzzy. And perhaps some venerated chief is under there? It is hard to know why someone would go to the trouble of hauling something so sizable up into the nearly trackless mountains, or would think that an animal should need such things as acorn-grinding pots in the afterlife. But rather than poking about the site any further, the appropriate course seemed to be consulting with the surviving local Natives to find a medicine man who could re-inter him, with the appropriate ritual apologies for disturbing his rest. Unfortunately this attracted some attention from the county, who were perturbed about the permitting requirements for grading work in the Reservoir watershed. That is not the sort of thing the Stouts care to bother with. They consider that Lupin is their land, and that it is nobody's business, including so-called authorities, to ask questions about what they do on their own land.
And Sal, likewise, considers that the Canyon is his land, and that it is nobody's business, including so-called authorities, to ask questions about what he does on his own land. The mountain man's attitude has little changed since 1850. About halfway from Lupin to Mt. Charlie Road, my commute would take me past the stained-glass works that are all that remains of Holy City, a settlement founded by a white-supremacist preacher who wanted his people far from all the Sodoms and Gommorahs down below, until every one of the buildings burned down: apparently, though this was never proven, the preacher himself was the arsonist, for you see, lawyers were threatening to take control of the place away from him, and that would never do. So, no matter what anybody says, I imagine that Lupin Lodge started out, before it expanded over the decades into the building now seen only in black-and-white photographs, as quite the opposite of a roadhouse, more likely the cabin of some cantankerous loner. Perhaps Rodney would know, but he will not say: Rodney is the ghost who used to clatter around the Lupin Lodge, and according to Maureen and Keif can still sometimes be heard poltergeisting in the Nudome area.
There is another ghost, of far more pleasant disposition, a young lady dressed in frilly Victorian garb and wearing sweet jasmine perfume. Since Maureen, who has been here seemingly forever, had never seen her, I was doubtful of her existence. Jean, who used to live Up Top, first told me about her, and Jean is from New Orleans, raised largely in the voodoo tradition by black women of the sort who would not usually take in a white girl, but latched onto Jean because of her vivid imagination. But then someone else told me about her, in the course of telling me his life story, which is something that total strangers often do to me at Lupin. He had once had a construction business, which he had carefully built up for over ten years, but he came to suspect that his manager was ripping him off. It was on a Good Friday that he told the manager to bring in all the paperwork the following Monday, and on Easter Sunday before sunup, as he was stepping out onto the porch to collect the morning newspaper, a man tried to brain him with a lead pipe. He fended off the blow, but got his left arm broken in the process, and knocked the pipe away, but his assailant pulled out a gun, shot him three times in the gut, and left him for dead. It was a long time before he got out of the hospital, by which time his manager had disappeared with all of his money, and he lost his nice house, and eventually his wife too, for she grew weary of his self-pitying timorous inability to shake off the experience and start anew. Lupin is a magnet for souls filled with trouble and sorrow, many of whom find healing. He was visited late at night by a kindly female voice saying Hello, surrounded by the scent of sweet jasmine, but he could not make her out through the doorway, and emerged from his suddenly chilly yurt, I think it was Number Ten, which I call Kitty yurt because of the deck where cats bask on sunny days, to see who it was, finding no-one. Lupins scarce grow at Lupin nowadays, but jasmines still do, in some places Up Top.
I suppose that the female ghost must be from a better-recorded period, when from the late 19th to early 20th centuries a family operated a vineyard here, for wine used to be made in far more areas of California than just the Napa and Sonoma valleys now known for it, but Prohibition shut that all down, and the former vineyard could not make a go of it selling raisins, against the competition of Fresno, so a wealthy retired executive from the Union Pacific bought it, to live out his last years, and largely let the place revert to nature. Then in the heart of the Great Depression a group of refugees, from World War I and from the troubles that would become World War II, acquired the property, to turn it into a European-style family naturist resort, and it has been nudist or at least clothing-optional ever since, although in recent times the clothed typically outnumber the naked even on a sunny summer day, however hard the nudists have tried to fight back, as when Keif's dad took to stealing all the clothes from the habitually-dressed when they were in the sauna or the pool, until nobody on the whole mountain had a stitch left except for the towels, which he then started stealing also, or so Keif retells the story, but he has been known to improve a tale. The Natives had been habitual nudists too, except that in some tribes the females would wear a little loincloth, and in winter, loose fur robes were called for, so I make it a special point to stay naked, even when the temperature is not quite what I would like. It was not even permitted to wear clothes on summer days back when the resort started, at first under the name "Elysium", which was subsequently taken over by a different nudist place further south, and then for a while it was called "Rock Canyon" though that name more accurately refers to the neighboring land that Sal now has, and finally it reverted to "Lupin".
Europeans gradually gave way to Americans, though there are still a few. Veny is left over from the last big influx of them, the Czechs who came in the wake of the "Prague Spring" calamity of 1968 and used to play exuberant volleyball on the court that now usually sits forlornly empty. I do not know why the little boys Nils and Ian have names from Scandinavia and Scotland, when the mother is French: I am not the type to ask, letting people tell me things if they wish to. But I think she is the last French-speaker left: Paulette and the two Georges and the Parisian fan-dancer are just photographs from the deep past. And the troubled old man, haunted by his forced participation in the Hitler Youth, who died alone in his cabin and was not discovered for a while, since everyone had become a little afraid of him, was the last of his kind here. For a while in the Seventies, the swingers and the perverts had the run of the place, alienating long-timers, for those were the days of gold chains and cock rings and white powder on mirrors. At the end of that decade, Glyn Stout acquired sole title, after a murky power-struggle with the Boswell Faction, but I know little about all that, except that bitter feelings still linger thirty years later. Of course, money woes have much to do with the infighting: the Great Depression was actually a good time for little resorts offering relatively cheap getaways, for the same reason that it was a good time for the movies, and a lot of nudist places started in the Thirties, which have fared less well in times since that were more prosperous for other kinds of business.
The Summit Fire of 1985 threatened all of Aldercroft, invading us as far as Lizard Ledge on the Upper Trail, where you can also see rattlesnakes basking and, nowadays, almost every local species of plant, still competing for the territory two decades after they all sprouted in the wake of the fire, when the fire marshalls were camped out here for weeks, using the grounds as a staging ground and taking all the water from the pools to save neighboring houses, and then the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 was particularly disastrous here. It was disastrous elsewhere, too: the double-decker freeway that collapsed, crushing people in their cars, is a bad memory for many. But Loma Prieta, the "dusky hill", is right by us, on my commute along the stretch of Summit Road from Old Santa Cruz to Soquel-San Jose, and close does count in horseshoes and Richter 8 tremors. A swimmer in the upper pool was actually thrown over the fence by a giant wave, and the lower pool was so badly cracked that it never was quite repaired, and had to go, and the replacement of the lower pool has been a controversial issue ever since. The quake put so much dust in the air that it rained for days, turning all the grounds into chilly mud just when there was, of course, no electricity, and the propane tanks could not be trusted, and there was no good way to keep warm or cook food. Keif says his dad saw a ten-foot-wide rent opened up in the earth here, and couldn't see the bottom to tell how deep it was, but mudslides changed it radically during the soggy days that followed. Maureen cannot bear the sight of orange cones anymore, as they dredge up memories of orange cones and mesh fencing and yellow crime-scene tape all over the grounds, until a horde of volunteers, more than we would get nowadays, swarmed in to repair things. Many of the structures were demolished: Glyn's cabin was twisted, spared from sliding all the way down into the Reservoir only by the trees it fell against, and never really has been set right, and the original Lupin Lodge was totally wrecked, but from its foundation, a large chunk of tree-stump, neatly sawn level on top and bottom, was salvaged, as a brass plaque now affixed to it attests, wood that must have been felled in the 1840's. It was in July of 2009 that Maureen set this relic in the Oaktree Circle as the base for the glass table where I can nowadays usually be found, inevitably drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and sometimes, like now, typing away on my laptop.
chapter 2
I first met Maureen on July 13, 2009, a date which, at least in our insular little world, will live in infamy. Did you know that FDR's speechwriter actually wrote "December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history"? The speechwriter was a little too shaken to give his best work, so FDR had to personally take charge of making the text more punchy: on the date that will live in "infamy" the Japanese didn't just "attack" our naval base, they "ruthlessly attacked", and so on. Maureen was conceived on Pearl Harbor Day. Her parents knew that for an absolute certainty, for her father was home on leave from the British Army, and only got to spend one night in his own bed, when the news came in from Hawaii, which of course meant that all leaves were cancelled at once. Since Maureen did not start coming to Lupin until the end of the Seventies, I suppose she counts as the very last of the European refugees, if Britain counts as Europe, an issue about which the British have divided opinions. And while she might seem too young to count as a refugee from World War II, events like bombs falling right by your house are an exception to the general rule that humans do not remember things from the first three or four years of life, and she swears she recalls the Blitz, particularly the smelly little cramped shelter room. And her mother lost a whole extended family, for while Maureen's father was High Church Anglican, her mother was Jewish. That family had lived, relatively prosperous and unthreatened, in a village in Switzerland for generations, but went to Warsaw, for what reason nobody has ever discovered, at precisely the wrong time to go to Warsaw, and were never heard from again. Her mother seldom spoke of it, but would often play the Warsaw Concerto on the piano, and I have learned that when Maureen puts on her earphones to listen to the Warsaw Concerto, it is not a good time to try to talk to her. When she listens to Madame Butterfly, of course she is not to be interrupted, but afterwards she will be talkative.
I had seen Maureen around the grounds before the portentious 13th, feeding the cats every evening. The cats were fixed, years ago, so all our cats are elderly now, except Faye's feisty young Kiki, who is not accepted by his elders. And I'm pretty sure I already knew that "The Cat Lady", whom some others called "The Hobbit" (you would have to see her to appreciate that), lived in what I call Butterfly yurt, because of all the butterfly objets d'art on the porch, much as I call Gina's place Unicorn yurt, although officially, it is only the cluster of three yurts atop the bluff across Little Village road, the Calla Lily, Tiger Lily, and Jasmine yurts, which have funny names. The main row of yurts is simply numbered One to Ten, Unicorn yurt being Number Three, much as Flying Pig yurt is Number Four, and of course Butterfly yurt, with the raised board outside holding cat food where only the cats can get at it, except for the blue jays and the crows and the more acrobatic of the squirrels, and with all the skunks hanging around, eating the cat food that drops on the ground, which the cats consider beneath their dignity, is Number One, a fact which Maureen and I can never mention without going off into: "I am Number Two!" -- "Who is Number One?" -- "You are Number Six!" -- "I am not a number, I am a free man!" -- "Why did you resign?" The seaside village where The Prisoner was filmed is right by the Welsh town where Maureen's sister Rosie was mayor for a long time, highly unusual since the Welsh are suspicious of outsiders, particularly outsiders who come from England, yet Rosie had learned to speak Welsh fluently and in fact could no longer speak English without a thickly Welsh accent. And Maureen's other sister Liz went off to New Zealand, where she was hired to map an area but got tired of the surveying and just filled it in the way she wanted it to be, and there was yet another sister Vivian and a brother John, but let us not speak of them.
I had nodded and waved at her before, as she was puttering around what would become the Oaktree Circle, to pick up the miscellaneous trash that had accumulated there over the years, clearing it out to become the new smoking area, while I would be standing just below, naked of course, with my inevitable cigarette, in the old smoking area on the side of the Restaurant lawn by Hidden Oak cabin, which was a particularly stupid area for a designated smoking area, since Hidden Oak was a prime rental, there in the middle of the action, and the breeze was generally in the direction to take the smoke right in there. Since smokers are a persecuted minority in California, of course she would greet me and tell me to be sure to come up to her Circle when she was done creating it. I seem to remember there was an old wagon wheel up there among the odds and ends, but months later when I asked her where that particular piece had gone, she had no recollection of there ever having been such a thing, so perhaps I dreamt it. There was opposition to the idea of claiming that area for the smokers, since there was a stage under the great oak, which had been used every summer weekend for quiet concerts of classical or folk music, or the naked black tenor who sang so beautifully, in happier years back when I only came to Lupin at long intervals on my sporadic visits to see Turtle, and is still used occasionally, generally by rock musicians. Perhaps that opposition had something to do with the explosion that followed, but the area did need a good cleaning, as no-one could deny, and Maureen was the only one willing, so she was doing it. Have I mentioned that there is a great oak tree there? A double oak tree, actually, two trunks fused at the base, which I call Grandmother and Grandfather, since this oak appears likely to be the ancestor of most or all of the other oaks in the vicinity. Maureen said she thought a botanist had once told her the oak was over 700 years old, which, as with so much else that I hear at Lupin, sounded dubious to me, but surely it has been standing since before the white man came, for if it is not so large as some multi-century oaks I have seen, that is only because it stands in poor soil, and the gnarling of the limbs, and the many scars where it has shed great branches in the past from lightning strikes or whatever other cause, and the wisdom that flows out when a receptive person lays a hand on it, all testify to deep age.
So she was under the tree, with Lori Kay and Cindy, that day when we first met. I call it our first meeting because in our previous nods and greetings we had never gotten as far as exchanging names, and I knew her only as The Cat Lady, for I was a total newbie then, had only once met Cindy, a week before, and while I had met Lori a few times, it is odd for me to recall that it was not until that day that I got the first inkling that she was the most powerful personage in Lupin. Now, Cindy is a woman of strong personality whom some are repelled by, although personally I have never had a problem with her. She has New Agey tastes, and dyes her short spiky hair sometimes pink, sometimes maroon, or whatever other shade of red, and sometimes wears garish clothes, like the Spandex, teal green above and magenta below, that I see her in today, although in summer she prefers to be naked, despite a heavy build and wrinkly cellulite. John Horne, who is sometimes, to distinguish him from all the other Johns on the grounds, called Horny John, although that joke is so obvious and so lame that most people forego it, once joked to me that when Cindy goes camping, the bears put their food in Cindy-proof lockers. I met her when she was leading some women in water aerobics in the pool, on a lazy Sunday morning, the 5th of July, the day after my birthday, when exercise sounded like a good idea to me, and so I joined in, and enjoyed it, and came back for it the next Sunday, but it didn't happen, and then the Sunday afterwards I saw it on the events board, but only after it was done and over, and that was the last time. When she is DJ at weekend dances, she affects the title of "Goddess Rising", which Veny habitually mangles, when he type-sets the monthly calendars, into "Goodess Rising", so we sometimes call her "the Goodess".
Lori had been among the water-aerobics set, and chatted with me a bit, asking me about my interests. I said that I liked to play board games and card games, which had been true, although now that I think of it, I have not played a single game of any kind since I moved into Tiger Lily, not even the chess match that John Horne challenged me to and both of us seemed eager for but somehow never got around to. So Lori asked if I played bridge, and when I said I had been good at it back in college days but had not found a foursome in years, she asked me to call her sometime and try to set up a game, which is odd in retrospect, since Maureen told me there had been regular bridge games at Lupin for a long while, but Lori had never ever played, and the only card games lately are the poker nights, with Veny and Richard M always, Will and Modern Nick sometimes, and guys I don't know. I had spoken with Lori a couple times in June, when I was trying to arrange a rental agreement, but it was Harry who showed me Tiger Lily, and negotiated the lease, eventually, getting it done the day after I'd moved in, and promising to put a copy of the lease in my mailbox as soon as a mailbox was assigned to me, although this did not occur, so, while Harry has the laidback demeanor of an aging stoner, plays cool-jazz piano, and drives a perpetually sickly wheezing car, I took him to be the general manager. Faye explained that everything gets done here on "Lupin time", which appeared to be the sort of time-sense one encounters in Mexico or Turkey, but I was gentle with Faye, for she said that Tiger Lily had been booked for a busy weekend in August, but she would move those guests into the Massage yurt, which I knew was a sacrifice for her, as she was the masseuse. Lori's role was less clear: Sergeant Dita, so called because she is Army retired, and retains a military posture, called me from the office twice in June to set up an appointment with Lori, but once she was not around at all, and the other time she was said to be upstairs and too busy to come down, so I only got to talk to her when I stopped by Lupin and she was in the office by coincidence. She did handle the "Membership Application", since Lupin is run more like a club than like an apartment complex, and interviewed me to see if I was a likable enough sort, and at that time, God have mercy on her, she decided that I was, but she had to run a background check to see if I was a registered sex offender anywhere. The application form asked what "contribution to the community" I planned to make, and I put down the fateful words, "I am the sort of person that people like to talk to." I had not yet realized how much people at Lupin love to talk, but I have ever since faithfully executed my designated role as The Ears of Lupin.
So, while I had the vague impression that Lori must be senior to Dita, Faye, and Gina in the office, she didn't seem to be the person who got things done. It hadn't even been revealed to me that her last name was "Stout": since everyone called her "Lori" but she introduced herself as "Lori Kay", I would have written her first name as "Laurie" and her last name as "Kaye" if I had been pressed. I knew, or thought I knew, that Glyn Stout owned the place, but I had been put into some doubt about that when I first met Simone and Samara, a pair of "enantiomorphic" twins, which is a poorly understood phenomenon in which genetically identical twins turn out directly opposite in some ways, one left-handed and the other right-handed, one with hair-whorl clockwise and the other counter-clockwise; I have even heard of a case where one was gay and the other straight, and while it would be way too early to know anything about that particular aspect in this case, their personalities are strikingly different. I put it to Maureen, who knows them better than anyone, that Simone is a natural Republican, while Samara is a natural Buddhist, and she thought that quite apt. After my first brief encounter, John Horne said, "Those are the owners of Lupin: they're the ones we really work for," which I did not know what to make of. I think he too was under a misapprehension, that I was a new staff member, perhaps an impression he got from the habit I had acquired in my days at Turtle Lake, my nudie place in Michigan, of bending down to pick up little bits of trash everywhere I walk, for which I receive payment in the form of occasional lucky pennies, or even larger coins once in a great while, a habit that gave me the nickname "Moonshine".
I had, at least, seen that Lori bossed around all the staff, and I had gotten some intimation that she would want to boss around me as well, when Sergeant Dita was dispatched to tell me that Lori said never to smoke in my yurt, which I assured her I did not do, and that my experiments with driving my car down the side-path to Tiger Lily yurt and parking right in front were disapproved of, and I assured her I had already decided myself that it was not workable, and would henceforth continue to park only where I was right then, in the designated, log-chip-sprinkled driveway. Dita was apologetic about relaying such messages to me, and asked if she was being rude, so I assured her I was not taking any offense. Indeed I was rather puzzled as to what the issue was, and wondered whether Lori was overstepping some tacit boundary. So you see, when the bombs started falling, metaphorically speaking, on July 13, it would have been clarifying for me to understand that Lori was Glyn's wife, and the mother of Simone and Samara.
chapter 3
The argument was originally just about the tree. Lori pointed out that the new smoking area would not, unlike the old one, have any adequate light, and smokers do after all keep smoking into the evening, so she proposed hanging a permanent light on the tree, and this was all amicable enough until she pointed to the spot, on the Grandfather trunk not far above the separation from Grandmother, where she would drive a spike to hang the light from. Maureen retorted vehemently that the old oak had had quite enough nails pounded into it over the years, and that this kind of continued abuse could kill or injure the tree. Lori pooh-poohed such objections, since the tree had survived so many nails already, which to Maureen indicated not just a lack of concern for the health of the tree, but an attitude of downright disrespect for such a venerable old creature, an objection which Lori did not seem to find comprehensible. The escalating volume in these exchanges made it plain even to me, ignorant as I was of the dramatis personae, standing there just below, naked of course, with my inevitable cigarette, trying hard not to appear as if I were eavesdropping, that there were deeper issues in play.
Abruptly, without any segue, Lori turned it into an argument about the children. If Maureen was going to take such an attitude, why then she would not be allowed to be "Grammy" to the girls anymore. It was Maureen's turn to pooh-pooh Lori, saying she would always be their Grammy: how could that possibly change? Lori insisted that the girls would not be allowed to speak to Maureen or go near her or have anything to do with her. Absurd, Maureen replied: who would take them to school or, since school was not in session, who would take them to gym class? Lori had a simple solution: they will not go to gym class anymore. Oh come on, they love their gymnastics more than anything, which was undeniably true as even I knew, having seen them cartwheeling and handstanding across the lawn, and besides, the classes were already paid for, for the rest of the year. Well then, that was all the more reason those gym classes should be disallowed: the girls must not have anything that Maureen has paid for, ever again! The exchanges began to escalate not merely in volume now, but in sheer incoherence.
Lori did an excellent job of the dramatic stomp-off, and Maureen did an equally good job of restraining the weepy breakdown. Cindy was appalled, and stammered that Lori didn't mean any of it, and was just being Lori, and would take it all back tomorrow, like always. Cindy's reputation for being confrontational is not entirely deserved: she does indeed give as good as she gets once involved in a face-off, but I have often observed her strong preference to stay out of face-offs when she is not a direct party. Cindy wandered off, so I came up, to listen to The Cat Lady if she needed to talk it out, as was my self-assigned duty to the community. She was not, actually, in any mood to talk about it any further. She introduced herself, and got my name in return, although she has generally referred to me since then as "Professor", or "The Nutty Professor". And all she asked of me at that time was whether I could help repair the swingy chair.
Oaktree Circle is next to a children's play area, with monkey bars and swings and a puppet theater and a merry-go-round, all on hard ground and gravel so the kids can hurt themselves, with a pole sticking up, for the kids to impale themselves on, with defunct old electrical outlets, from when the area was an artists' studio instead, until Lori vetoed that and disappeared all the artworks that Maureen had created there, except for one piece showing a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, which Maureen had managed to salvage for her porch. The proximity of the children's play area might raise some legal issue about the appropriate distance to a smoking area, and Maureen's protege' Adam, an omni-competent Iraq vet whom she was the first person in the world, but not the last, to call "the Army of One", was charged at one time with measuring how far back the glass table ought to be moved, but as with other jobs that might raise disputes, somehow Adam never did get around to that. The Circle is, after all, a less stupid location for the smoking area than the old place, and not nearly in the league of stupidity of the designated but seldom-used smoking area behind the Restaurant, which is situated directly by the largest propane tank on the property, so that the staffers prefer to do their smoking, tobacco or other, around the dumpsters by the kitchen door. But aside from the children's swings, there was an adult swing, of the sort one might find on a porch back East, but which some exuberant child, perhaps it was Albert, had overswung, tipped over, and broken apart.
Could it be salvaged? Brief examination showed me that the reason for its disintegration was actually quite simple: there were supposed to be four screws holding the frame together, and there was only one, so I looked about to see if the other screws had somehow been knocked loose and were lying about the ground, but Maureen assured me it would be more in keeping with the Lupin way to assume that only one screw had ever been in place. From Butterfly yurt she retrieved a tray filled with miscellaneous screws, nails, nuts, and bolts, in which I eventually found one screw that was a little too large but which I could get wedged in to the point where it was never going to move again, one that was a little too small but could be made to fit with a glob of Crazy Glue, and one that was just right. We decided that the most level place was where an old redwood bench, now graywood from years of sun, had been standing until we wrestled it aside, so the question arose of where to put this bench. We settled on a position by the steps leading down to Hidden Oak, but carrying it that minor distance proved beyond our waning strengths. Would turning it over and sliding it make it easier? Actually, this increased the friction tremendously, and as I tried to yank it by one of the upturned legs, the rotten leg broke off in my hand and dumped me on my bare butt in the gravel. However, only my dignity, such as it is, was injured. Maureen assured me that OG, a tall elderly black man of quiet dignity and hard-working habits who lives deep in the Back Forty and speaks with a near-incomprehensible accent from deep in the bayou, would haul the now unlevel bench away and replace it with Michelle's bench, which had been sitting neglected for some time somewhere over in the Sleepy Hollow area of the grounds, where some people live who generally keep to themselves, so that I scarce know any of them even yet.
So, we immediately became the fastest of friends. We would sit in the Circle nearly every day, with our inevitable cigarettes, and talk for hours. She might talk about how she and Glyn had worked their tails off rebuilding the nature trails Up Top in the years after the earthquake, in the morning until she had to go off to feed Glyn's cat Rowdy, whom Glyn loves very much but never feeds, driving over in her car, always with the same tape playing, Moody Blues, In Search of the Lost Chord. And in the afternoon she might tell me how she and Jane Goodall, later known as the chimp lady, would rescue ponies when they were teenagers, and I might tell about the time I hiked across Turkish Kurdistan, until it was time for her to do her evening round of feeding the cats, Smooth Bell and Little Bell and all the other members of the Bell family, and dear Samantha and arrogant Simon Legree, and one-eyed Vanna and poor Judy's Fuzzy Davis and all the others. And in the evening we would talk about the nature of reality, and whether it is true that wishing makes it so, until she put on her earphones to listen to Madame Butterfly, or unplugged the earphones for Bob Dylan, so that I could sing along, since I knew all the words and sounded, she said, more like Bob Dylan than Bob Dylan does. On Maggie's Farm she would change it to "Lori's Farm", and change "She's 68 but says she's 54" to "She's 66 but says she's 67" since she did not like the somewhat beastly number 66 and would not give that as her age, and I shared the extra verses I had written for that song years ago: "I ain't gonna work for Maggie's sister no more / Nawww I ain't gonna work for Maggie's sister no more / She winks when no-one's looking, tries to lure you to her bed / The face on that woman would frighten the dead / I'd rather go out naked into war / I ain't gonna work for Maggie's sister no more ... I ain't gonna work for Maggie's cousin no more / Nawww I ain't gonna work for Maggie's cousin no more / His eyes are always bugging, halfway out of his head / I never could follow one word that he said / Half of it is nonsense, that's for sure / I ain't gonna work for Maggie's cousin no more."
The Army of One bought, well OK it was Maureen's money if you want to get technical about it, but Maureen's money is Adam's money as far as she is concerned, a string of bubble lights that solved beautifully the original issue about illuminating the Circle, along with some oil lamps, two of which at Chef Phil's suggestion we hung from the ends of the swingy chair, while the third was kept in the middle of the table on a silver platter, surrounded by a ring of votive candles on evenings when the breeze would permit us to keep them lit, and the bundles of spare bubble lights, for which we had plans, and spare drippy-hoses besides the one I used to water the ring of rosemary around the Circle, in the mornings when I came down to wipe off the glass table, if not very well, and hear Maureen tut-tut about the smears I left and how poorly my mother had evidently trained me in the art of table-wiping, along with extra blankets and towels, since nudists always need towels, and other miscellanies were left sitting on the graywood bench, to deter people from trying to sit on it. I kept dribbling green wax from the taper I used to light the other candles, and Samara called those splotches lily pads, homes to invisible frogs, so I would work around them as I wiped the table, and they only disappeared gradually, like the presence of Samara herself, whose less frequent visits would prompt Maureen to bouts of reminiscence. Maureen and I have tried to tell each other our life stories, speaking of things we had never voiced to another soul, but as both our life stories are more complicated than most, we still have a long ways to go even now. And Maureen's style is so tangential that when I invited up my friend Jimbo, who is the only person in the world to call me "Viceroy Cabrillo", since long before I heard of Cabrillo College, for he is "Capitan de Portola" and our buddy Dominic is "Padre Junipero Serra" in the triumvirate of conquistadores who go camping everywhere, claiming each new site "in the name of the Empire of Spain foreeeever", el Capitan Jimbo nicknamed her "Virginia Woolf", and if I too am being Virginia Woolfy, going off on all these run-on sentences that seem to leave little hope of ever wandering back to the point, that is because it seems to be the only style which could possibly hope to convey the quintessential Lupinity of this place.
It was not immediately apparent that a war had begun, for although Lori is not the type to apologize for anything, it did seem possible for a while that Cindy was right about the argument being forgotten, and there was a relatively quiescent period, reminiscent of the 1940 Sitzkrieg between the French and Germans, after Poland had been destroyed but before the Western Front erupted. Lori did permit the girls to go to gym class, though she took them herself and did not let Maureen take them anywhere. She had already hired an au pair from the Netherlands to babysit them for the whole month of July, a very nice and perky-breasted girl named Emy, pronounced "Amy" but not to be confused with the hard-working Amy who came much later, but the girls were not always with Emy and sometimes came up to the Circle to sit with "Grammaureen" and me. There was a little sketch-pad in which Samara had drawn a doodle-bug, which became a message pad for Maureen, Adam, and I to leave notes for each other in those latter days when the girls were forbidden the Circle, but back then I remember a day when Simone sat down to the sketch-pad and drew a cute-looking panda bear, and informed me that this panda was "Evil! Eeeeeevil! He is so, so evil!" And Samara would stage silly plays with the giraffe and the crab in the puppet theater, although Maureen told me about a play she had once put on, about "the Black Widow Spider, who eats her husband, and then starts eating her children," and when Lori would tell her it was time to go, she would say "Stop interrupting! Now I have to start over! The Black Widow Spider eats her husband..." and Lori would interrupt again and re-start the cycle, appearing utterly oblivious to the subtext of the play.
And when the Army of One bought, well OK Maureen bought if you want to get technical about it, new sand-filters for the pool, and installed them, with some help, since he cannot quite do everything all by himself, from Roy LNU, the tall electrician and general handyman with the ZZ Top beard, there was a large cardboard box left over, which sat by the wall guarding one end of the entrance to Oaktree Circle, at the other end from the graywood bench and the steps down to Hidden Oak. The box was immediately adopted by Samara as a playhouse, decorated with chains of silvery stars and artificial flowers, protected by a bit of fencing and "Keep Out!" signs, and filled with her crayons and scissors and construction paper. Of Gina's boys, little Santino had not so much interest in the playhouse, but Carlos, who is nearly of an age with the twins, and has an unconcealable crush on Samara, had standing permission to go in anytime, even if Samara was not there, although the older Albert, who would also try to go in all the time, was expressly forbidden: "Albert can't not be in the box," the sign read, which, as Harry pointed out, actually meant that he could never fail to be in the box. And three-year-old bright-eyed unruly-blond-mopped Brandon, sometimes called "Little Bubba" since his dad Chris was called "Bubba", was often in there, and would stash his favorite bead-strings in the box.
What can I say about Brandon? He was far more articulate than a child his age had any right to be, speaking not only grammatically, but in complex sentences with clauses and everything, and fearlessly making up words that sounded like what he meant, whenever his vocabulary was not quite adequate. Once, he was jumping up and down in the TV room, and his pants fell down, so he looked at me, whose nudity he had never really seemed to take any particular notice of before, and said, "There, you see, now I'm just like you!" before pulling his pants up. Another time, his pant-cuffs were inverted, so Maureen tried to adjust them, but he insisted, "These are MY pants, so let ME do that!" But I was most struck by the time when he and Carlos and Santino went racing for the swings, which looked like trouble since there were three boys and only two swings, and sure enough when Santino lost the race he started crying and trying to shove Brandon off his swing, so I was on my feet at once, and then Brandon said "This is my swing, but you can have it," let Santino take his place, and started pushing him gently. The whole community loved him, although it was Ronnie the groundskeeper, the only person in the world who calls me "Bill" although he generally corrects himself, who tended him most of the time, since Chris the bicycle repairman, sweet though he is and a devoted father, has never been quite right in the head since his motorcycle accident.
Pam too was a caretaker to both Chris and Brandon, and it was Pam who greeted me at the gate, there by Fairmont trailer, saying "Welcome to Lupin!" on July 1st when I pulled up with my car full of stuff to move into Tiger Lily, although I had been to Lupin a dozen times before over the years, and had even been staying with Turtle in Hummingbird cabin from May 21st to June 10th, stretching Turtle's right to have guests ten days out of the month to the absolute limit of the law. I would hear about Pam, but only spoke to her once more, when Brandon was tearing across the parking lot and I ran to intercept him, since Ronnie was nowhere in sight, but Pam came up and said, "It's OK, I've got him," and I replied, "Just making sure some adult eyes were on him," and Pam expressed appreciation for that. So, when Maureen told him, "You're a Lupin baby, all right," no-one was surprised to hear Brandon retort, "No, I'm a Lupin DUDE!"
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