New Testament Authors, Part I: The First and Second Gospels

INTRODUCTION

I’m often amazed at how disinterested most Christians seem to be on the question of who wrote the Bible.  This perplexes me because it seems, to my mind anyway, that it should matter where the texts came from, who wrote them, when, and why.  Yet these questions don’t seem to concern many Christians that I know. 

Just to test this theory out, I ran it by some of my Christian family members.  None of them cared.

Be that as it may, the authorship of the Bible is an important issue, and some folks may be surprised to discover just how little we really know about who wrote these texts and where they came from.  The history of how we got the Bible is complex and can fill volumes.  Here, I intend simply to provide, in a continuing “series,” an overview of the authorship for each of the 27 books of the New Testament, briefly discussing the various perspectives.  My hope is to keep these discussions brief and accessible, while still detailing the pertinent information. 

THE GOSPELS

Any discussion of the New Testament usually starts with the four Gospels.  These are the books that tell us intimate details about the life of Jesus, from his birth up through his baptism, ministry, and death in Jerusalem.  Almost as interesting as the content of these texts is the discussion about who, exactly, wrote them.  In what follows, it is important to keep in mind that the Gospels, themselves, are anonymous.  They did not come with titles, and nothing in the text tells us who the writer is.  The authors of these Gospels clearly figured their audience would know who they were. 

The Gospel of Mark

Date: 70 C.E.

Textual Claim: Anonymous

Church Tradition: John Mark, a companion of Peter and Paul

Mark is not the first Gospel in our Bibles, but it was the first Gospel to be written, composed somewhere around 70 C.E., about the time that Jerusalem was falling to the Roman legions and the Jewish people were being dispersed throughout the Mediterranean world.  Because it was traditionally believed to have been the second gospel written, it is typically referred to as the Second Gospel.  I put it first simply because scholars now know that it was, in fact, the first to be written.   

Church tradition has attributed this Gospel to a man named John Mark, said to have been a companion of Paul and later a secretary to Peter.  This view goes back quite a long way, all the way back to the first part of the 2^nd century, with a writer named Papias, who, we are told, was the leader of the church in Heirapolis, in modern day Turkey. 

Scholars tend to date Papias’ work to roughly 115 C.E.  As far as post-New Testament authors go, Papias is one of the very earliest that we know about.

None of Papias’ writings have survived for scholars to read.  We know of him and his work only because he was quoted by Christian writers who came after him.  As such, we have a few statements from Papias, but no complete works.

One of his quoted pieces deals with the authorship of Mark.  He states: “Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered.” 

This isn’t much, of course, but it’s enough to establish that by the first part of the 2^nd century, Christians were attributing some text or another to Mark, a companion of Peter.  Whether Papias understood this to be the same Mark who had previously been a companion of Paul (and who, according to Acts, parted ways early on with Paul) is unclear.  It is also not clear exactly what text Papias is talking about.  Is he referring to our Gospel of Mark?  Or some other text purportedly written by Peter’s companion?  There is nothing in our Gospel of Mark to suggest that it was written by a companion of Peter (one might expect, for instance, that it would be heavily “pro-Peter” if it was written by one of his followers, but it is not). 

There are other reasons to suspect that Papias may have been talking about a different text.  To begin with, Papias quotes several stories that are not found in any of the four Gospels of the New Testament.  He gives, for instance, an account of the death of Judas that is completely different from the ones found in Matthew and Luke.  Additionally, he quotes a parable of Jesus that is not found in any other source, either inside or outside the New Testament.  Could these stories have come from the text that Papias believed was authored by Mark?  If so, then he certainly was not referring to the text we know as the Gospel of Mark. 

In addition to the general doubts about what text Papias was talking about, there is also the issue of who, exactly, John Mark was.  We know from the letters of Paul that he had a companion by this name, though Paul simply calls him “Mark.”  “John Mark” is how he is referred to in the book of Acts.  In Acts, Mark and Paul have a falling out, and Mark abandons him, never to return to the story.  In the book of 1 Peter, ostensibly written by the apostle Peter, Mark is also referenced as sending his greetings to the recipients of the letter.  Is this, perhaps, where the tradition comes from that Mark, after abandoning Paul, became the secretary of Peter?  Perhaps, but there is nothing in the text itself to indicate that this is the same Mark.  In Acts, for instance, when Mark leaves Paul, he doesn’t go to Peter, but instead sets out with Barnabas.

In the end, it seems likely that the text we know as the Gospel of Mark was probably not written by anyone who was a companion of Peter or Paul, or even by anyone named Mark.  The attribution to Mark, the secretary of Peter/companion of Paul, seems to be a “best guess” by early Church fathers attempting to assimilate the available data and add authority to those texts considered pure and orthodox by the emerging Church.     

The Gospel of Matthew

Date: 80-85 C.E.

Textual Claim: Anonymous

Church Tradition: Matthew the tax collector, also called Levi, a disciple of Jesus

Matthew is typically called the First Gospel, even though it is now known to have been the second gospel written.  When it comes to this text, the waters become even murkier than with the Gospel of Mark.  Perhaps the best place to start is with the identity of the person we call Matthew.

In Church tradition, Matthew was also known as Levi, and he was a tax collector.  In Mark’s Gospel, this connection is not explicit.  There is a story about Jesus calling a man named Levi, who is a tax collector, but later – when Mark provides a list of the 12 disciples – Levi is absent.  A man named Matthew is named as one of the disciples, but there is no suggestion by Mark that this is the same person as Levi the tax collector.  In the Gospel of Matthew, the conundrum is cleared up.  When this author re-tells Mark’s story about Levi the tax collector, he doesn’t call him Levi at all, but instead calls him Matthew.  Luke does not tell the story of the tax collector, but does mention that one of the disciples was named Matthew.

We also have a reference to a disciple named Matthew in the Gospel of Thomas, though no biographical information is provided.  Additionally, there is a reference in the Gospel of Peter to a disciple named Levi, but again there is no biographical information.

Clearly, the author of the Gospel of Matthew believed that Levi the tax collector and the disciple Matthew were one and the same.  This, in and of itself, causes one to wonder if that does not explain where the tradition of Matthean authorship comes from – the assumption being that the author of this text knew Matthew and Levi were the same person quite simply because the author was, in fact, Matthew himself.

Whether that is the source for the tradition of Matthean authorship or not, our earliest reference to this tradition again comes from the aforementioned Papias.  Papias says: “Matthew put together the oracles [sayings of Jesus] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.” 

We are faced again with the same problem we saw with Mark.  Is Papias talking about the same text we know as the Gospel of Matthew?  Here, the doubt is even greater, because as anyone familiar with the Gospel of Matthew knows, it is not simply a list of sayings (“oracles”) of Jesus, but an entire “gospel” detailing Jesus’s life from birth to death.  Papias’ description actually sounds more like the Gospel of Thomas than the text we know as the Gospel of Matthew.  Furthermore, the Gospel of Matthew was written in Greek, not Hebrew.  Before you wonder if it might have originally been written in Hebrew, and simply translated later into Greek, there is no evidence to suggest this.  I am certainly no ancient Greek scholar, but those folks who are scholars of ancient Greek have ways of determining if a Greek text is an original Greek composition or a translation from some other language.  From what I understand, it is widely agreed that this text is an original Greek composition. 

There is one more point to be made about Papias’ identification: recall from the discussion of Mark that Papias gives an account of the death of Judas which is different than the account found in Matthew and Luke.  If the text Papias knew as Matthew was the same text we know as Matthew, why would Papias give an account of Judas’ death that differs from what is found in Matthew? 

It seems likely to me that whatever text Papias was talking about, it was not the Gospel we know as Matthew. 

Again, we are in a position similar to the one we faced with Mark: the disciple Matthew almost certainly didn’t write the text we know as the Gospel of Matthew, and even the disciple Matthew’s very identity is in question. 

In Part II, we will look at the authorship of the Third and Fourth Gospels, Luke and John. 

Read Part II.

The Synoptic Problem, the Q Gospel, and the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew

Perhaps no other textual issue in Christian scholarship has been discussed and debated more over the years than the sources used by the writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The discussion, frequently called “the Synoptic Problem,” began in the late 18th century, and continues today in the 21st.

Why is this a problem? To begin with, these three Gospels are very similar in content, sometimes relating stories word-for-word between all three Gospels. In addition to containing many of the same stories, a lot of the literary structure of these three Gospels is similar. This is why they are called “Synoptic” – from the Greek word “syn,” meaning “together,” and “opsis,” meaning “to see” – they can be “seen together” because of their literary and grammatical similarities.

Secondly, while all three Gospels have material in common (often called the “Triple Tradition”), there is a significant amount of material found only in Luke and Matthew, but not in Mark (this is called the “Double Tradition”).

Finally, there is material in all three Gospels that is unique to each Gospel. In other words, there are stories found only in Mark, stories found only in Matthew, and stories found only in Luke.

This, then, is the nature of the “problem.” How can all these various textual traditions be explained?

Problem or not, why is this such an important issue? Why does it matter? Quite simply, because it makes such a dramatic impact on conclusions historians can draw about the life of Jesus and the rise of early Christianity. Knowing when they were written, and how they came to be in the forms we have them today, is vitally important to understanding the traditions handed down to us by the first generations of believers, and by Jesus himself.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Until the rise of modern New Testament scholarship in the 19th century, virtually everyone agreed that Matthew was the earliest Gospel, followed by Mark and Luke. This is why they follow in that order in our Bibles – Matthew, Mark, Luke.

But beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scholars and historians studying the texts of the New Testament began to see new patterns that had gone unnoticed, and frankly unlooked for, prior to that time. Since these inaugural studies, three theories have come forward as likely candidates to explain the way these three Gospels are connected.

The first theory goes along with Church tradition of Matthean primacy (i.e. Matthew was written first), but suggests that Luke came second, followed by Mark. According to this theory, Luke used Matthew as a source, which explains why there is so much material common between them. Mark, on the other hand, used both previous Gospels as source material. Since Mark is so much shorter than the other two, this theory supposes that Mark was written as a sort of handbook version of the longer, more detailed Gospels that preceded it.

The second theory denies this Matthean primacy and instead asserts that Mark was written first. Matthew came second, using Mark as a primary source, and repeating almost 90% of Mark’s contents. By this theory’s assertion, Luke was last of the bunch, also using Mark as a source but not using Matthew. Instead, the material common between Matthew and Luke, and which is not found in Mark (the “Double Tradition” referred to above), comes from a source no longer in existence, which these scholars have called the Q Gospel (“Q” being short for the German word “quelle,” which means “source”). Thus, Matthew and Luke both used Mark and Q as source material, but were independent of one another.

Finally, the third theory takes themes from both the previous two. It agrees that Mark was written first, and that Matthew came second and used Mark as a source. However, it is skeptical of the existence of the Q Gospel, and instead asserts that Luke used both Mark and Matthew as sources. So this theory agrees with Theory 2 on the Triple Tradition – Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source – but agrees with Theory 1 on the Double Tradition – Luke also used Matthew as a source.

Among modern scholars, only a fraction still adheres to Theory 1. Virtually nobody in the modern academy supposes Matthew was written first. Similarly, in recent years, Theory 3 has become less and less prominent. As of today, it’s fair to say that the majority of Biblical scholars accept Theory 2 – that Mark came first, Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, and that Matthew and Luke also used a second source in common, called Q, which is no longer in existence. There are still some prominent scholars who are skeptical of Q, but it appears that the thrust of modern scholarship is moving towards Q, not away from it.

THE Q GOSPEL

So what, exactly, is the Q Gospel?

As noted above, scholars are virtually unanimous in their agreement that the writers of Matthew and Luke used Mark’s text as a primary source. Thus, whenever we find the same story in all three Gospels, we know that Matthew and Luke got the story from Mark.

However, as also noted above, there are a significant number of stories found in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. These stories are frequently the same, word for word, in both Gospels. If Matthew and Luke didn’t get the stories from Mark, then where, exactly, did the stories come from? Not oral tradition, because two authors writing from oral tradition would not give the same word for word accounts. Instead, we have the Q Gospel. As the theory goes, this was an early Gospel containing mostly sayings of Jesus, available to Matthew and Luke, but now lost to history.

There is a lot of evidence to support the 1st century existence of this document. First of all, since we know Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, it is not unreasonable to assume they used other written sources too. Luke, in fact, implies just this thing when, at the beginning of his Gospel, he tells us explicitly that he has combed through all the available writings about Jesus in creating his own text.

Secondly, by looking at all the stories from this hypothesized text, one can begin to analyze it critically. For instance, the majority of the stories in Q are apocalyptically-oriented. This is a distinct literary and theological style, thus implying strongly that we are dealing with an actual third written source, rather than simply one author copying the other (in this case, Luke copying Matthew). Almost all of the apocalyptic language in Matthew comes from this common material. If Luke had been copying Matthew, what are the chances that it was only Matthew’s apocalyptically-oriented sayings that Luke copied?

To make this point a bit clearer, consider the following analogy:

Suppose there is a pair of lovers whose love story has been told by several different writers. Some of those writers depicted the story as uplifting and inspirational, while others depicted the story as a tragedy.

Writer A decides to write his own version. His account is mostly uplifting and inspirational, but he has a few scenes that are quite depressing and tragic.

Writer B also decides to write his own version. His account, like writer A’s, is mostly uplifting and inspirational, but he also has a few depressing scenes.

In analyzing these two accounts, one discovers that in the tragic, depressing scenes, both writers tell virtually the same story, word for word. But in all the other scenes, the writers use different language and tell their stories in their own unique words.

Given that you know Writers A and B both used earlier sources for their own version of the story, and given that you know those sources vary in how they tell the story, how would you analyze the sources each writer used? Would you assume that Writer B copied Writer A, but only on the depressing, tragic scenes, or would you simply assume that both Writer A and Writer B used the same earlier source, a source that was mostly tragic and depressing, for the word-for-word scenes in question?

Clearly, the most likely answer is the second one: Writers A and B shared a source. That source is clearly a version of the story that is tragic and depressing, and since both writers used this source, this explains why they have some tragic, depressing scenes, and those scenes are repeated almost word for word. This also explains why their other material is told differently – it’s told differently because Writer B was not copying Writer A.

This is the case for the Q material. It has a literary and theological theme – namely apocalypticism – which is obvious to anyone who reads the material. Outside of this material, Luke and Matthew tell their stories of Jesus differently from one another (with the obvious exception of the material they both got from Mark). Since everything else is different between these two texts, and since the word-for-word material has a verifiable theological theme that is not generally found elsewhere in Matthew and Luke, it seems clear that this material is coming from an actual third source, and not simply from Luke copying Matthew.

Third, in hypothesizing this Q document, scholars were essentially creating a whole new category of early Christian gospel – now called “sayings gospels.” At the time, in the 19th century, there was no evidence to suggest any such gospel style had ever existed. Yet, in 1945, just such a gospel was discovered – now widely known as the Gospel of Thomas. Thomas is not the lost Q Gospel, but it is a sayings gospel, proving that the genre existed in early Christianity.

Fourth, most scholars believe that Matthew and Luke were written closely together in time: Matthew perhaps around 85 C.E., and Luke around 90 C.E. If these dates are right, it is hard to imagine that Luke could have had access to Matthew’s Gospel. Texts simply didn’t get spread around that quickly in the ancient world. Even if these dates are wrong by 100%, meaning ten years between them, that still doesn’t seem like enough time for Luke to be familiar with Matthew’s text.

Finally, there are so many massive differences between Luke and Matthew in other areas of their Gospels that it is almost unimaginable that Luke had Matthew’s text in front of him. Take, for instance, the stories of Jesus’ birth. Both agree Jesus was born to a virgin named Mary, that his earthly father was Joseph, and that he was born in Bethlehem, but that is where the similarities cease. Virtually every detail of the stories differs between these two texts. The same is true of Jesus’ resurrection accounts between the two Gospels. It is also true in some of the other stories, for instance in their vastly different accounts of how Judas Iscariot died, and even in the identities of Jesus’s twelve disciples. If Luke used Matthew as one of his sources, then either the “Matthew” he used was not the same as the Matthew we know today, or he simply believed that Matthew got a whole bunch of really important details totally and irreconcilably wrong – and yet he took him at face value on some of his material, particularly his apocalyptic material, and copied much of it word for word.

On this point, it’s also important to point out that while the Q material is frequently word-for-word between Luke and Matthew, Luke frequently places the sayings in different circumstances. For instance, Matthew’s famous Sermon on the Mount is Q material. However, in Luke, it’s not on a “mount” at all, but on a plain, and the sayings are in a different order and some aren’t there at all. This is but one example of many. Again, it seems that we are dealing with a lost gospel, one that provided a list of Jesus’ sayings, and Luke and Matthew both used those sayings, placing them in their own unique narrative contexts. If Luke was using Matthew, we should expect these Q sayings to be in a similar narrative context. But they simply aren’t in most cases.

In the end, it is my opinion that the evidence supporting Theory 2 – which includes the Q Gospel hypothesis – is persuasive and overwhelming. Mark came first. Matthew and Luke were written later, both independently using Mark as a source. They also had a second source in common, a list of sayings attributed to Jesus with very little narrative framework. They used these sayings differently, placing them in different narrative contexts, as one would expect in such a situation.

THE ARAMAIC GOSPEL OF MATTHEW

If you’ve followed my arguments up to now, you may realize that there are still some unanswered questions. What about the material that is unique in each Gospel? Where did those stories come from? Furthermore, how come sometimes Matthew and Luke’s Q material is virtually identical, but other times it varies dramatically in how it is told?

There are no clear answers to these questions, but I have formulated some theories aimed at clearing up the confusion.

Turning first to the question of unique material in each Gospel, it is ultimately impossible to explain where this material comes from. If Mark was written first, and did not use the Q Gospel as a source (and it does not appear that he knew of this Gospel), then his stories are all unique. We have no idea where he got his information. Church tradition says Mark was written by John Mark, a companion of Paul and later a secretary to Peter. Papias, an early 2nd century bishop in the region of modern Turkey, provides this information, saying that Mark wrote down all he remembered from his travels with Peter. This, of course, may or may not be accurate.

As for the unique material of Matthew and Luke, Matthew’s unique material is usually dubbed “M,” and Luke’s unique material is usually dubbed “L.” Of the two, Luke has by far the most unique material, comprising something like 40% of his Gospel. So what are these “L” and “M” sources? Again, we don’t know. Most assume the material came from oral tradition known to the individual writers. This is probably true, but it’s also possible that some of this material came from other actual texts that are no longer in existence. There is just no way to know. It’s even possible that some of this material came from Q, but since only one author quoted it, we can’t know it came from Q. We only know Q material when both Matthew and Luke repeat it.

Turning now to the second question, why is some Q material so similar between Matthew and Luke, and why is some of it so different?

Here, it is necessary to consider some clues from early Christian writers, primarily of the 2nd century. To put it simply, a lot of early Church fathers seemed to believe that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew (which, in context, probably meant Aramaic, the language of Jesus). This, in fact, seems to have been common knowledge in the 2nd and 3rd centuries – so common that Christian gospels of this era frequently connect the name “Matthew” with scribes – that is, with people who were writing down stories about Jesus. Consider the opening of the Gnostic text known as the Secret Book of Thomas: “The secret words that the savior spoke to Judas Thomas which I, Matthew, wrote down, while I was walking, listening to them speak with one another.”

As for the writings of Church fathers, consider the words of the aforementioned Papias, writing in the early part of the 2nd century: “Matthew put together the sayings [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.” Also, from Iranaeus, writing near the end of the 2nd century: “Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome and laying the foundations of the church.”

Thus, if Papias and Iranaeus can be trusted (and Iranaeus, by the way, probably got his information from Papias), Matthew must have been written originally in Hebrew/Aramaic. There is a problem, here, however. As anyone familiar with the Gospel of Matthew will know, Matthew is not merely a list of “sayings” of Jesus, as Papias contends. It’s a whole biographical Gospel in narrative form. Is it possible that what we call the Gospel of Matthew was not the same text known by the same name in the 1st and 2nd centuries? In fact, this is a conclusion drawn by a lot of modern scholars. Many scholars, for instance, will refer to Matthew’s writer as “the editor of Matthew.” For these scholars, the original Matthew was a shorter version, mostly just sayings, that was later expanded into its present form.

What text from the first century do we know of that sounds like this proto-Matthew?

Well, the Q Gospel of course.

HOW IT MAY HAVE HAPPENED

What will follow is my own reconstruction, based on several years of studying this topic. It is by no means the final word on the subject. However, I think it’s at least a possible, if not likely, scenario.

Around 30 C.E., Jesus died. Shortly thereafter, his disciples became convinced that he was still alive, risen from the dead and glorified to the right hand of God. They became “apostles” – preachers of the good news – and Christianity began to blossom and spread. A few years later, say around 35 C.E., a Jew named Paul was converted to Christianity after having a vision of Jesus. He made dramatic steps towards establishing Christian doctrine and beliefs, and he helped spread the story of Jesus beyond the Jewish homeland, into the Greek-speaking world.

Around 50 C.E., say about 20 years after Jesus’s death, one of his disciples decided to write down sayings he remembered of Jesus, fearing that the knowledge might be lost. He may not have been – and indeed probably was not – the first person to do this. In any case, the disciple in question was Matthew, also known as Levi. Levi had been a tax collector prior to following Jesus, and while this made him a pariah in Jewish society, it was a job that would only have been handled by someone of at least some financial means and likely some education. As such, he may have been the only literate disciple of Jesus.

In any case, he wrote down a list of sayings he remembered from Jesus. He wrote in Aramaic, which was his own language and the language of Jesus. This was not a Gospel in the traditional sense, but a list of sayings with very little narrative context. There was nothing in this text about Jesus’s birth, death, or resurrection. Instead, Jesus is shown as an apocalyptic prophet using typical rabbinical teaching techniques (one-liner quips and parables), as well as performing charismatic healings and exorcisms.

Called the Gospel of Matthew at the time, scholars now call this document Q, and it is no longer in existence.

Several decades later, around 70 C.E., Mark wrote his Gospel. He does not appear to be familiar with the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew. It is unclear where he got his information, though it may have come from the traditions passed on by Peter.

Perhaps around this same time, the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew was translated by another writer into Greek, the common written language of that era. This would have been done so that the Gospel could be read by those who did not speak Aramaic (which, after 70 C.E., included an increasing number of Christians). This Gospel was still in its “Q” form at the time.

Sometime later, perhaps in the mid-80’s C.E., another writer came along and decided to expand the Greek version of the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew. He was familiar with Mark and wanted to use Matthew’s stories to expand Mark. He wrote the text that we know today as the Gospel of Matthew, including all the sayings from the original Aramaic Gospel of Matthew, as well as the vast majority (over 90%) of Mark’s Gospel. He also added in some new material, drawn most likely from his knowledge of oral tradition. Despite writing in Greek, this man was Jewish, writing to a Jewish audience.

Some 5-10 years later, another writer, Luke, came along, using all the resources available to him. He did not have access to the new, longer, Greek version of the Gospel of Matthew, but he did have access to the Greek translation of the original Aramaic Gospel of Matthew. He also had Mark and probably other written and oral sources as well. He used a lot of Mark and all of the Greek translation of the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew. Sometimes he copied Mark and proto-Matthew (i.e. “Q”) word for word, but sometimes he changed the wording to suit his own purposes. It’s also possible that he was not using a Greek translation of proto-Matthew, but was instead translating it himself from the original Aramaic, which would explain why sometimes his translations are virtually identical to what we find in our modern Matthew, and other times they vary dramatically.

This, then, is my reconstruction. What we today call the lost Q Gospel was actually a sayings text written by the disciple Matthew, a few decades before Mark. Mark didn’t know this text. This Q Gospel/proto-Matthew was later translated into Greek and then expanded to include Mark’s information and some other oral traditions. Finally, Luke used both the Q Gospel/proto-Matthew text (either in Greek or Aramaic), and Mark, to compose his own account. He was not familiar with the longer version of Matthew that we know today.

If this speculative reconstruction is true, then the Q Gospel is significant as not only the earliest document detailing the life of Jesus, but also the only Christian writing in existence that was based on firsthand knowledge – namely the knowledge of Jesus’s disciple Matthew.

Judas and the Great Betrayal

If you follow my blog, you’ll know I’ve written previously on the subject of Judas, but like a lot of issues in Christianity, it is one worth revisiting from time to time.

In this essay, I want to look specifically at a question many people may not have given much consideration to: Did Judas actually betray Jesus?

Though some scholars, such as J.S. Spong and Hyam Maccoby, have suggested that Judas himself is a fictional creation, most scholars accept that Judas was a real figure of history. He seems certainly to have been one of Jesus’ followers, though there is very little we can say about him as a person. What we do know is that Christian history tells us that Judas was the betrayer of Jesus. Are these stories reliable?

For many Christians, the answer to this question would seem obvious. Of course Judas betrayed Jesus. It is one of the most familiar stories from the Gospel tradition. We find the stories in multiple accounts, some of which are independent of one another.

These independent sources are one of the keys scholars look for when determining the historical reliability of a story from history. If two authors give us the same story, but one of those authors used the other author for his information, then we have only one independent account. If, however, two authors give us the same story, and they are writing independently of one another, then this increases the probability, in the estimation of historians, that the story is reliable.

In the case of the betrayal, we do have these independent accounts – the two primary ones being Mark and John (Matthew and Luke both used Mark as source material). We may have other independent accounts as well, including the 2nd century Gospel of Judas (this text has only been available to scholars for a few years, but the preliminary research indicates that the writer probably did not know the Gospels of the New Testament).

As such, there seems to be good historical reasons for supposing that the betrayal story is true. There is a problem, however. And it’s a big one.

Put quite simply, our earliest sources reveal no knowledge of the stories about the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, one of his inner circle.

This is a big problem because in addition to multiple independent sources, scholars like to have early sources. The earlier the better. While we have multiple independent sources for the Judas stories, they are not our earliest sources. Our earliest sources, on the other hand, make no mention of Judas, and imply instead no knowledge of anything like a betrayal by anyone, much less one of the Twelve.

Just what are these sources? The first is the hypothetical source scholars call Q. The Q Gospel is the common material between Luke and Matthew that is not found in Mark. Scholars are in virtual unanimous agreement that Luke and Matthew both used Mark as a primary source. However, there is a lot of material found in both Luke and Matthew that is not found in Mark. Where did this material come from? This is what scholars believe is the Q gospel – a text no longer in existence, but available in the 1st century to Matthew and Luke, which contained very little narrative framework, but was instead primarily a list of sayings attributed to Jesus, many of them apocalyptically oriented.

There are some scholars who doubt Q’s existence, but in my experience, the majority of major textual scholars accept it as real.

In any case, the Q Gospel is by its very nature earlier than the Gospels – at least earlier than Matthew and Luke. It is impossible to say, of course, whether it predates Mark, but most Q experts believe it was composed sometime in the 50’s or 60’s C.E., prior to Mark or the other Gospels.

As such, it is an early source for Christian material, and it is noteworthy that it includes nothing about Judas Iscariot or any betrayal of Jesus. Now, this in and of itself is not so strange. The text is mostly just a list of sayings attributed to Jesus, with very little narrative. It could be that the Q writer knew of the Judas story, but simply did not find it germane to his literary purposes in compiling a list of Jesus’ sayings.

More important than this problem of omission, however, is the fact that one saying attributed to Jesus in the Q Gospel implies that not only did the author of Q know nothing about the betrayal of Judas, but neither did Jesus.

Our later Gospels, of course, tell us that Jesus had foreknowledge that he was going to be betrayed. Consider, however, this saying from Q. In it, Jesus is speaking to his disciples in private:

Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

What’s so world-shattering about this statement? Quite simply, Jesus apparently has no knowledge, at least at this point, that Judas is going to betray him. He predicts that when he comes into power in God’s kingdom, his twelve disciples – all twelve disciples – will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. This group, by necessity, must include Judas Iscariot.

Not only does this passage contradict later Gospel depictions of Jesus having foreknowledge of Judas’ treachery, but it also implies that the writer who wrote these sayings down also didn’t know anything about Judas’ treachery, otherwise we can assume he would have redacted it appropriately.

The second early source at issue here are the letters of Paul. Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian texts in existence, written during the 50’s C.E., or about twenty to thirty years after Jesus’ death. In them, Paul never mentions anything – not one solitary word – about Judas Iscariot or his betrayal of Jesus. He implies no knowledge of any such act.

Like the omission in Q, some may write this off as unimportant – Paul’s purposes in his letters were to address specific problems in his congregations, so it stands to reason that he may never have had reason to bring up Judas Iscariot. Indeed, Paul mentions virtually nothing about the life of Jesus at all in his letters. So this fact of omission about Judas may not tell us much.

But, again like the saying in Q, Paul does say something that implies he had no knowledge of Judas’ betrayal. It comes in a famous passage in 1 Corinthians where Paul is talking about the people the risen Christ appeared to. He states that Jesus appeared “to Peter, and then to the Twelve.” Of course, we know from our Gospel accounts that Jesus appeared only to the eleven remaining disciples, because Judas was gone by then. And Paul couldn’t have been referring to Judas’ replacement, Matthias, who was voted on by the remaining disciples as depicted in the book of Acts, because that event occurs after Jesus’ ascension into heaven. As far as Paul was aware, the Twelve were still intact after Jesus’ death.

The most common argument against this point is that when Paul used the phrase “the Twelve,” he was using it as a generic title for Jesus’ inner circle. They were known as “the Twelve,” even though one eventually departed and betrayed Jesus. This, of course, is certainly possible, but it doesn’t seem very probable. The Gospels, after all, do not use any such euphemism. They tell us explicitly that the risen Christ appeared to “the Eleven.” The Twelve were no longer intact. Furthermore, making this assumption requires reading something into the text that is not actually there. It requires reading Paul through the lens of the later Gospels. If one had only Paul’s letters to go on (as his congregations did), one would make the plain, simple, and obvious deduction that the Twelve were still intact after Jesus’ death.

Some of my more savvy readers may be screaming by this point that I have overlooked a salient passage in Paul, where he explicitly talks about Jesus’ betrayal.

The passage in question is from, strangely enough, the same letter where Paul talks about “the Twelve” – 1 Corinthians. This time, Paul is talking about problems the Corinthians are having while celebrating the Lord’s Supper. In one of the very few instances where Paul refers to an event in Jesus’ life, he writes: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread…”

This seems to be a reference to a familiar passage from the Gospels – Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, which occurs on the night Judas betrays him. Clearly Paul is talking about Judas here!

Not so fast.

The word translated in that passage as “betrayed” actually means “handed over,” whether handing over car keys or handing over a perpetrator to the police. Depending on context, of course, it can also mean something like “betrayed.” In the Gospels, for instance, this is the word of choice for describing what Judas did – he handed Jesus over. Since Judas was part of his inner circle, and did it behind his back, this constituted a “betrayal.”

However, without context to imply an act of betrayal, the word simply means “handed over.” In Paul, there is no context given to suggest betrayal. Quite literally, Paul says: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread…”

But couldn’t the context be implied? Perhaps Paul and his readers know how Jesus was handed over, and know who did it, so Judas and his betrayal are simply understood in unwritten context. This is possible, but when one looks at the greater context of how Paul, himself, uses this word most commonly, a more reasonable context comes into play.

Put simply, when Paul talks about Jesus going to the cross and being resurrected, he frequently uses this same word. But when he uses it elsewhere, he uses it in the context of God “handing Jesus over” to be crucified.

Consider, for instance, Romans chapter 8: “He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?”

Or Galatians chapter 2: “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

There are roughly ten other similar examples in the writings of Paul, where he uses this word to refer to passing something on, or giving something up, or handing something over. Never does he use the word to imply betrayal. And when he specifically uses the word in regards to Jesus’ death, as in the quotes above, it is always an act of God; God handed Jesus over to death so that we might be saved.

Given that context, it is reasonable to assume that in the passage from 1 Corinthians, when he is talking about the Lord’s Supper, he is saying, in effect, “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over [by God unto death], he took bread…” This fits into the context with which Paul exclusively uses this word. It only fits into a betrayal context if you read Paul through the lens of later authors and their stories, and ignore Paul’s own way of using the word.

Even if one wants to argue that Paul was, in fact, referring to Jesus being physically handed over, and not just God “handing Jesus over” to death and resurrection, the phrase still does not explicitly tell us that this “handing over” was an act of Judas or one of Jesus’ inner circle. Perhaps Paul meant that Jesus was “handed over” by the Jewish leaders to the Roman authorities – which is, of course, consistent with the later Gospel accounts. Perhaps he means that some other person known to Jesus “handed him over” to the authorities. A nosy neighbor, perhaps, or the groundskeeper of the garden where Jesus was arrested.

This is all speculation, of course, but the point is that Paul is not explicit. The only context suggests that Paul is speaking metaphorically about an action of God, but even if we assume he was speaking more literally, there is no indication that this “handing over” was an act of betrayal by Judas or anyone else of his inner circle. This is particularly true in light of the fact that Paul’s use of the phrase “the Twelve” implies that he knew of no inner circle betrayal.

There is a possible third early source to consider as well. Most scholars date the Gospel of Thomas to the early 2nd century, but a few scholars, notably J.D. Crossan, have argued that Thomas predates the Gospels of the New Testament, composed around the same time as the letters of Paul and Q.

If we accept this early date for Thomas, it is significant to note that Thomas also includes nothing about a betrayal, and implies no knowledge of any such act. Like the Q Gospel, Thomas is a sayings gospel, providing very little narrative framework. In any case, Judas and the betrayal are never mentioned or implied.

This leaves us, of course, with the problem I mentioned at the beginning. We have multiple independent accounts of the betrayal by Judas, but these are later accounts, and our earliest accounts say nothing about the event, and instead say other things that imply the writers, in fact, had never heard of Judas’ betrayal.

How do we reconcile this? Ultimately, both camps have some explaining to do. If one doubts that Judas betrayed Jesus, then one must explain why our later accounts, some of them independent of one another, agree in their descriptions of Judas betraying Jesus. But if one accepts that Judas did, in fact, betray Jesus, one must explain why our earliest accounts don’t reflect the story, and the writers seem to know nothing about it.

In my opinion, this second “explanation” is the tougher one. There are, however, a few possibilities. Perhaps the Q hypothesis is completely bogus and Q never existed. Instead, the Q material is simply Luke copying from Matthew. Therefore, we can’t count Q as an early source that does not show any knowledge of Judas’ betrayal.

Furthermore, even if we accept that Q is real, the fact that the betrayal is never mentioned is immaterial. It also never mentions Jesus’ death by crucifixion, but we know that happened. And the quote about the “twelve thrones” may simply reflect that the historical Jesus did not know Judas was going to betray him (even though he is later depicted as having this foreknowledge).

As for Paul, perhaps “the Twelve” was just a euphemism, and when he talks about Jesus being “handed over,” he was, in fact, thinking of Judas, and knew his readers would know what he was talking about.

Even if we accept that Paul knows nothing about Judas, this still does not undermine the stories of the betrayal. Maybe Paul simply hadn’t heard the story. Paul claims in his letters to have gotten his information originally by direct revelation from the risen Christ. He explicitly denies that he heard the story of Jesus from the disciples (see Galatians chapter 1). Perhaps the risen Christ simply didn’t find it necessary to tell Paul about the betrayal.

For me, none of these explanations is very satisfying. The issue with Paul, in particular, is a very tough one. I can simply think of no way to explain why Paul wouldn’t have been intimately familiar with the story of Judas and the betrayal, if in fact it happened. How could he not have known this information? Even if we accept his assertion that he did not first learn the story of Jesus from the disciples, he certainly met the disciples later in life – before he wrote 1 Corinthians. He tells us about these meetings, after all. By the time he was writing that letter, it is simply unthinkable that he would never have heard the Judas story.

Is it possible, some may ask, that Paul and the author of Q (and Thomas, if it is early) were simply trying to suppress the story – that it was an embarrassing moment, one that folks like Paul were not inclined to talk about? This, I suppose, would be the best explanation, if one accepts that the Judas stories of the Gospel tradition are historically reliable. By the Gospel era, it wasn’t such a painful memory because so many years had passed. But during the early years, when Paul and the Q author were writing, Christian evangelists weren’t as likely to talk openly about it.

As for the other side of the debate – those who are skeptical of the betrayal stories – what answer can be given to explain the stories of the Gospel tradition?

This is an easier question to answer, in my opinion. It does not take a graduate degree in world mythology to understand how legends can and do arise. The stories of Judas in the Gospels are simply polemical. Judas is the embodiment of “the Jews,” and thus painted as the betrayer and Christ-killer. Why Judas, and not someone else? Maybe Judas was an easy target. Perhaps he died shortly after Jesus’ own death, and by the time of the Gospels, no one really knew anything about him, thus making him an easy pick for a betrayal legend – particularly given his name. Perhaps Judas had some kind of falling out with the early Christian movement. Perhaps he didn’t like what the other disciples were saying and preaching, and instead preached a different gospel – one at odds with the others. Perhaps he grew disillusioned after Jesus’ death and decided that they had all been deluded by a fancy talker. Maybe he became an enemy of the Christian movement because he thought they were crazy for claiming that Jesus was alive. Any of these things could explain why he would later come to be vilified as the betrayer of Jesus.

In the end, I tend toward skepticism about the betrayal stories. For me, I simply can’t get past the idea of Paul not knowing about the betrayal. He must have heard such stories, if indeed those stories were around, yet his words imply the opposite. Taken together with the lack of knowledge in the Q gospel (which I believe existed), and Thomas (which I also tend to think is earlier than many scholars suppose), it simply seems unlikely to me that the betrayal stories are historically reliable. As I said earlier, I do accept that Judas was a follower of Jesus and a real person of history, but I think the speculations I provided in the previous paragraph probably give a better explanation for why he later came to be vilified in the Gospels of the New Testament.

The History of Hell

As noted in a previous post, I have been thinking recently about the Christian concept of hell, and although I have written about hell several times in the past, I wanted to add some fresh perspectives on the topic.

When I went off to college in 1993, to a small, Baptist school in central Kentucky, I had the same traditional beliefs about hell that many Christians still hold today: hell is a literal place where people who are not saved literally go to spend eternity in suffering and torment. Like many Christians, I don’t think I had ever given a whole lot of thought to this idea; I believed it simply because it’s what I had been taught from a young age. The bizarre idea that a loving God would send the vast majority of humans to suffer in eternal flaming agony for all eternity had not really crossed my mind. That was an intellectual conundrum I would not come to face for quite some time.

In any case, shortly after arriving at college, I heard talk about how one of the religion professors (at this small school, there were only about three) did not believe in hell. I was scandalized by this. How could someone, especially a Christian professor of religion at a private, Baptist college, not believe in hell? I found this perplexing indeed, and wrote it off at the time as simply the weird ideas of a new-age academic (“new-age” is the term I would have used at the time to refer to what is now frequently called “liberal” or “progressive”).

Now, seventeen years down the line, I count myself among those Christians who disbelieve in the existence of hell. I can state categorically that I do not believe hell is a literal place of flame and torment that exists in space and time.

This statement, of course, may cause my readers to ask the same sorts of questions I asked when I first learned about the religion professor who did not believe in hell. How can someone be a Christian and not believe hell exists? The Bible, after all, talks explicitly about hell. Hell, as the counterpart to heaven, has been part of Christian beliefs from the earliest days of Christianity. Jesus mentions hell in the gospels. When you deny the existence of hell, aren’t you essentially saying that Jesus was at best mistaken, and at worst a liar?

Like many issues within Christian history and theology, this requires a bit of background.

JEWISH BACKGROUND

In the Jewish scriptures – the Christian Old Testament – hell is never mentioned. Indeed, the ancient Jews had no conception of a place like hell. In the Old Testament, when people die, they simply go to the grave. Good or bad, Jew or non-Jew, the grave awaits us all. The Hebrew word in question is sheol.

Sheol was a word used both literally and metaphorically by the ancient Jews, much the same way we used the word “grave” both ways today. We talk about visiting our loved one’s grave, and we also talk about having “one foot in the grave.” The same is true of sheol in the Old Testament. It can be used metaphorically (“The cords of the grave [sheol] entangled me, the snares of death confronted me” Psalm 18:5), or literally (“The bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs [sheol]” Jeremiah 8:1).

Sheol was not, as some recent commentators have suggested, the equivalent of the Greek idea of Hades. In Greek thought, Hades was the abode of the dead. It was not a grave, but rather a sort of collecting place for human souls that had departed their dead bodies. All human souls went to Hades – good and bad. Hades was not a place of punishment or reward, but simply a place for souls to congregate in a sort of dreary underworld existence.

The reason sheol was not like Hades is very simple: ancient Jews had no concept, as the Greeks did, of a soul separate from the living human body. This of course, like the existence of hell itself, is different from much modern theology, which tends to affirm the existence of a soul. Our ideas about a soul separate from our bodies, of course, come from the Greek philosophers of late antiquity, most notably Plato. This Hellenistic philosophy was rampant through Judaism by the time of Jesus and the earliest Christians, which is why souls are talked about consistently by the Jewish-Christian writers of the New Testament. But in the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, the human soul is always mentioned in unified connection with the body. For the ancient Jews, souls weren’t separate. They did not leave the body at death. Soul and body were inseparable. The soul, for the ancient Jew, was equated to the breath. The very Hebrew word for “soul” had, as its root, the word “breath.” Just as God “breathed” his own “breath” into Adam, so our own human “breath” is equated with our soul or spirit.

What this all means is quite simple: the ancient Jews had no concept of an afterlife. Soul and body were inseparable, two sides of the same coin, and when a person died, their body (and thus their soul/spirit/breath) simply went into the grave. These ancient Jews, of course, had a concept of heaven, but heaven was not a place of eternal reward for everyday Jews. Heaven was the abode of God and his retinue, not a place pious Jewish souls ventured after death. And there was no concept of a place of punishment like hell at all. Death itself was punishment enough.

Why didn’t the ancient Jews conceive of an afterlife for everyday Jews? That’s a difficult question to answer, but at least part of the answer probably lies in the Jewish tendency to reject anything that smelled of Gentile theology. Remember that the story of the Jews began in slavery in Egypt. After the Exodus, when the Jews settled in the Promised Land and began forming their own kingdom and their own religious codes, they tended to reject all the trappings of “pagan” religions, especially those centered in Egypt, the land of Jewish captivity. They did not worship multiple gods, like the pagans. Unlike the pagans, they did not utter their god’s name. They did not build statutes or draw pictures in likeness of their god – they considered such things to be “idols.” And, unlike the ancient Egyptians, whose concept of the afterlife permeated all levels of Egyptian culture – indeed, it’s fair to say the ancient Egyptians were certifiably obsessed with the afterlife – the ancient Jews did not accept such pagan ideas. The afterlife was a Gentile notion; that, by itself, made it immediately suspect to the sensibilities of self-respecting Jews.

(It’s interesting to note that the ancient Egyptians, while having a very complex and well-developed theology of afterlife, also did not have any concept of a soul separate from the human body. As noted above, this is an idea that did not develop in Western culture until Plato and the Greek philosophers of late antiquity. The Egyptians mummified themselves for the very reason that they had no concept of a soul-body separation. The physical body itself needed to be preserved for the afterlife.)

CHRISTIAN BACKGROUND

We have seen that the ancient Jews had no concept of an afterlife for humans, which means they also had no concept of a place like hell. We have also seen that their word for “grave” – sheol – did not mean anything like the Greek idea of Hades, which necessitated a belief in a soul separate from the human body – a concept that did not exist among ancient Jews.

In the last few centuries before the birth of Jesus, however, Greek culture began to permeate the Jewish homeland. Although the Jews fought, and ultimately won, a great war against Greek overlords in the 160’s B.C.E., Greek culture had come to stay. The Jews, as they say, had become Hellenized.

With this Hellenization came new theologies and ideas. First and foremost, the Jews began to conceive of an afterlife. But their concept was not like afterlife conceptions most common in Christianity today. Since, despite Hellenization, Jews still clung to the idea of a soul inseparable from the body, the Jews began to develop the notion of resurrection. Those pious Jews killed so unjustly over the centuries by various invaders and persecutors, would one day be physically raised back to life. Their bones and bodies would literally reform and come walking out of their tombs.

Along with resurrection for the pious, Jews also began conceiving of punishment for the wicked. God would not only reward the pious with resurrection, but would enact punitive measures against evildoers. This punitive aspect of God was, of course, nothing new in Jewish theology. But where the God of the Old Testament had always enacted his punitive measures against evildoers during their lives (usually by some horrible method of dying), now God’s punitive measures would extend beyond the natural human life. Jews looked around themselves and saw their enemies and persecutors prospering, living fat and happy to a ripe old age. Clearly the old ideas about God’s punitive measures against Israel’s enemies could not stand up to this “modern” scrutiny. So Jews began conceiving of “ultimate” punishments for evildoers. While the pious would be resurrected, the evil would be eternally punished.

What would this punishment look like? In Jewish sources from the time, a number of metaphors are used to convey emerging ideas. From a 1st century B.C.E. book called the Wisdom of Solomon:

The Lord will laugh [the unrighteous] to scorn. After this they will become dishonored corpses, and an outrage among the dead for ever; because he will dash them speechless to the ground, and shake them from the foundations; they will be left utterly dry and barren, and they will suffer anguish, and the memory of them will perish.

Later, in the 1st century C.E., around the time of the New Testament gospels, a work of Jewish apocrypha called 2 Esdras was written, most likely in response to the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E. As an apocryphal book, it envisions the end of time and the Last Judgment:

The pit of torment shall appear, and opposite it shall be the place of rest; and the furnace of hell shall be disclosed, and opposite it the paradise of delight.

It was, of course, in the gospels of the New Testament, written about the same time, where we begin to see references to hell, usually on the lips of Jesus.

In both the New Testament, as well as the above-quoted passage from the book of 2 Esdras, the word used for hell is the Greek word geenna. This word referred to a place outside the city walls of ancient Jerusalem known as the Valley of Hinnom. It was here, in the Valley of Hinnom, that the inhabitants of Jerusalem deposited their collective waste products. It was, quite literally, a garbage dump. Because such a place would have been considered immensely unclean to average Jews, it was perpetually on fire, which helped to keep the contagion of “uncleanness” in check, and also helped the dump from becoming overwhelmed with garbage.

As such, references to geenna (often transliterated into “Gehenna”) were metaphorical in nature. When, for instance, Jesus states, in Matthew 23:33: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?” he is referring to Gehenna – the Valley of Hinnom, the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls. He is not, quite obviously, suggesting that God is going to send all evildoers to the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls for all eternity. He is using that place as a metaphor for destruction – which is, itself, a way of referring to exclusion from God’s kingdom. If you reject God’s love and God’s vision of justice, you are not part of God’s kingdom; you are as good as a corpse burning in the Valley of Hinnom.

Consider a modern analogy in regards to flushing a toilet. I might lose my job and, upon returning home, my wife might tell me that I’ve just “flushed my career down the toilet.” Does she mean that I have literally flushed my literal job down a literal toilet? Of course not. It’s a euphemism – a metaphor.

Suppose I said that evildoers – those who are not part of God’s kingdom – are flushed down the toilet. Would you suppose I meant a literal toilet and a literal flushing? No. You would understand that I was using a metaphor. Now suppose that a thousand years from now, Christians come to believe in a literal cosmic toilet where God literally flushes evildoers into an eternal tank of sewage and waste. Sound silly?

To literalize Jewish metaphors about the burning garbage dump outside ancient Jerusalem’s city walls is to completely misunderstand the idea that was being conveyed. If Jesus, or the early Christians who used the metaphor of Gehenna, could somehow be told about modern concepts of hell, based on the euphemisms they used in the 1st century, I believe they would find it bizarre at best. Geenna – Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom – was a metaphor used by early Christians to illustrate their ideas about what one’s life was worth outside the kingdom of God. It wasn’t considered in cosmic terms.

Despite its common place in Christian theology, hell is mentioned only about a dozen times in the entire New Testament. More than half of those come in the Gospel of Matthew alone. There are other references to “fire” or a “lake of fire,” but most of these also come in Matthew and the book of Revelation.

In the modern day, many people imagine Satan as the ruler of hell. This is reflected in our jokes and our colloquialisms. Yet, in the New Testament, no such thing is ever implied about Satan. Satan is not the ruler of hell; he is an evil presence on earth. In Revelation, in fact, the writer tells us explicitly that Satan lives and has his throne in Pergamum, a city in modern day Turkey!

I know where you are living, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you are holding fast to my name, and you did not deny your faith in me even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan lives” (Revelation 2:13).

Antipas, referenced in this passage, was the bishop of Pergamum who was martyred in the early 90’s C.E. (and not Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee during Jesus’ life).

There are only two spots in the entire New Testament where Satan is connected to hell, and these two spots, again, come to us from Matthew and Revelation. In both cases, the writers predict that Satan will be thrown into “the fire” at the end of time (in Revelation it is the “lake of fire and sulfur”). Hell, then, is a punishment for Satan, at the end of time, as it will be for evildoers. Satan does not rule hell.

In the same way that “hell” (geenna), is used metaphorically, so are these references to “the fire” and the “lake of fire.” They are metaphors for utter destruction. In the ancient world, fire was one of the four elements of nature, and it was nature’s destructive force. When an ancient person equated an ultimate punishment to “the fire,” it was a way of saying that the coming punishment was destruction. When Jesus, for instance, says that the “fire” is reserved for “the devil and his angels,” he is saying that evil’s fate is destruction. Again, if I said that my career has been flushed down the toilet, am I talking about a real toilet? Jesus isn’t talking about a cosmic pit of fire.

This may not be persuasive to many of my readers who believe strongly in the existence of a place called hell. But consider one final point. “Fire” and “hell,” as ultimate punishments for evil, are used most frequently by the writers of Matthew and Revelation. But other writers use them as well, particularly “fire.” Such references can be found in both Mark and Luke, as well as 2 Peter, Jude, and the book of Hebrews. Yet among these different writers, there is disagreement about the nature of hell. In Matthew and 2 Peter, for instance, hell, or “the fire,” is a place of complete destruction. For instance: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28); and “But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless (2 Peter 3:7). Additionally, Hebrews 10:27 speaks of a “fire that will consume” the ungodly, and 2 Peter, Luke, and Jude all make references to the utter destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, reduced to ash, and how that is a symbol of what will happen to the ungodly.

In all of these accounts, the ultimate punishment is destruction. Yet most people, when they think of hell, think of a place of eternal punishment, where one will burn in agony without dying, suffering through all eternity in unimaginable torment. In the New Testament, there are only two spots that seem to support this sort of view. The first is found in a parable of Jesus. As a parable, of course, the details are not intended to be taken literally in the first place, but to be seen as pointing to a greater truth. In any case, the parable in question is found in Luke’s gospel, and is usually referred to as the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. In this story, Lazarus is a poor man begging in front of a rich man’s house. The rich man ignores him. In time, both men die, with the beggar going to heaven, and the rich man going to hell. The rich man is in “torment” by the “fire,” and asks for a drink of water, which Abraham (who is there by Lazarus) is not able to give him, because of the great chasm that separates them.

There are a lot of interesting things to say about this parable, but the one that matters here is the image of hell not as a place of utter destruction, but a place where someone remains alive in tormenting flames.

The only other spot where this idea is supported in the New Testament comes at the end of Revelation, after Satan is finally defeated by the forces of God at the end of time. There, the writer tells us that the devil will be thrown in the lake of fire, to be “tormented day and night for ever and ever (Revelation 20:10). Again, this supports the idea of hell being a place not of destruction, but of eternal, unceasing torment.

These are the only two spots where this idea is affirmed by the New Testament. As noted above, there are far more references that support “ultimate destruction” rather than “eternal torment.” Furthermore, one of these two spots comes in a parable of Jesus – a morality tale rather than a statement of metaphysical truth. Additionally, it is important to note that Luke never actually uses the word “hell” (that is, geenna). Instead, he calls the place Hades. Also, he doesn’t say that Lazarus is in “heaven,” but rather “with Abraham.” Finally, as the use of the word “Hades” makes clear, by the time of Luke’s gospel (circa 90 C.E.), many Jewish Christians had been Hellenized by Greek philosophy, and had adopted the idea of Hades as a holding place for souls to await a final judgment. Luke adds in the idea of torment and flames, but since he calls the place Hades and not hell, it is consistent with his other comments (the Sodom and Gomorrah reference above) about the ultimate punishment being utter destruction. Hades first, then complete destruction at the end of time.

With that taken into consideration, it is fair to say that of all the New Testament writers who talk about hell, fire, and ultimate punishments, only one writer – the apocalyptic author of Revelation – affirms the idea of hell being a place of eternal torment, rather than a place of final destruction. And even in that account, it is only the devil, the beast, and the false prophet who are explicitly said to be “tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Other ungodly people will be thrown in the lake of fire, so they too will presumably suffer this same outcome, but that is not necessarily stated explicitly by the writer of Revelation. Perhaps only the devil and his angels will get that particularly odious fate.

CONCLUSION

We are left with a few things to make sense of. First, the Jews of the Old Testament did not believe in a place like hell. They had no particular afterlife beliefs at all, good or bad. By the start of the Christian era, Hellenism had brought ideas about souls, the afterlife, and Hades to Judaism, and Jews themselves had developed apocalyptic ideas about ultimate punishments and rewards. In the New Testament, these apocalyptic ideas are illustrated with the use of metaphors: ultimate punishment is related to the destructive element of nature – fire – and is symbolized by the metaphor of the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls – the Valley of Hinnom. Ultimate reward, on the other hand, is symbolized by the kingdom of God and a life lived in union with God. The yin-yang idea here is one of life and death; in early Christian practice, these were referred to as "the Two Ways." One led to destruction – that is, death – and the other to abundant life. Numerous authors in the New Testament describe ultimate punishment in terms of ultimate destruction. Only one writer explicitly refers to ultimate punishment as eternal torment, and even that is only given in the context of the devil and his minions. It is left unclear whether this counts for ungodly human beings as well.

For these reasons, I do not believe in hell as a literal place of eternal torment for people who have not made the right profession of faith. I believe hell is a metaphor for separation from the sacred, from God, and therefore functions as a symbol of what life apart from God might look like.

In the words of the early Christians, it’s like being thrown on the burning garbage dump outside town; in my own words, it’s like being flushed down the toilet.

Take Up Your Cross

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." Mark 8:34

Perhaps one of Jesus’ most familiar sayings, the instruction to take up one’s own cross has been repeated throughout Christian history to encourage the faithful and call unbelievers to salvation.

Recently, a Christian acquaintance of mine gave his own interpretation of this verse:

My personal theory [about taking up one’s own cross] entails this key phrase: “You must be born again.” This is the beginning of faith. You have to believe that he went to the cross and [was resurrected]. Lots of nice folks go to church…and never are “born again.” Now I am not putting these people down in any way, shape, or form, but the born again experience has to be “experienced” before the kingdom of God is revealed to anyone.

My perspective on Jesus’ instruction to “take up your cross” is somewhat different. Before I get to that, it’s instructive to consider the phrase historically.

The saying first comes to us in the Gospel of Mark, written around 70 C.E. It was later copied by Matthew and Luke, who used Mark as a source. Matthew changes the wording somewhat, but sticks with Mark’s general theme. Luke copies Mark word for word, but makes one slight change, saying that people must take up their crosses “daily.” This slight change seems intended by Luke to ensure that no one misunderstands Mark to be suggesting that Christians should martyr themselves like Jesus – in other words, Jesus is speaking metaphorically; he’s not commanding people to martyr themselves. One has to wonder if perhaps members of Luke’s target community weren’t encouraging one another to martyr themselves because they thought Jesus had commanded it.

In any case, we also find this saying in the Gospel of Thomas. The Thomas gospel is contentious because scholars disagree on when it was produced. Many believe it is a product of the 2nd century – relatively “late” as Christian scripture goes. Others date it around the time of the four Biblical gospels, and still others suggest that in its original form, it pre-dated the Biblical gospels completely and was written around the time of Paul’s letters, perhaps the 50’s C.E. Regardless of one’s own perspective on the correct dating of the work, many (perhaps most) experts agree that it is independent of the four gospels of the New Testament – meaning that its author was not familiar with those texts and was not using them as source material.

This is important because one criterion that historians use to judge the historical reliability of Jesus’ sayings is the so-called “independent attestation.” If a saying shows up in two or more early texts that are independent of one another, the likelihood is higher that the saying goes back to the historical Jesus. If a saying only appears in one text, or if it appears in multiple texts but those texts are not independent of one another, the saying still might be authentic, but there is less certainty about it. For instance, if a saying appears in Mark and also shows up in Matthew and/or Luke, that still only counts as one attestation because we know Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. Since Take Up Your Cross appears in both Mark and Thomas, it passes the criterion of multiple independent attestations.

This one criterion, however, does not necessarily give the entire story. Historians must also consider whether a saying fits in with historical context. In the case of Take Up Your Cross, this becomes an issue. Obviously, we know that Jesus’ life ended when he was arrested by the Jewish authorities, handed over to the Romans, convicted of sedition, and executed on a Roman cross. Before any of that happened, it is unlikely that followers of Jesus, or even Jesus himself, would have thought to make a religious metaphor out of a Roman execution device. Thus, this saying does not seem to pass the criterion of historical context. It seems far more likely that this saying was produced by post-resurrection Christians, thinking back on the life and death of Jesus. He was crucified on the cross; therefore we, as Christians, must also take up our own crosses.

Some might argue that since Jesus was God in the flesh, and since he routinely predicts his own death in the gospels, and since the gospels themselves are the infallible Word of God, Christians must accept on faith that Jesus, in fact, made this statement. To deny that may seem to some Christians as lack of faith at best, and blasphemy at worst. Indeed, such a position is faith-based, and faith-based beliefs are outside the realm of a historian’s work. I tend to agree with scholar and theologian Marcus Borg, who argues that one can believe on faith whatever they want, but what matters most is what it all means for us as Christians. Believe what you will about the nature of the resurrection, for instance, but what does it mean for you if you are a Christian?

I’ll get to the meaning of the Take Up Your Cross saying in a moment, but for the present, there is one more historical issue to consider. I have noted that while Take Up Your Cross passes the criterion of multiple independent attestations, it does not seem pass the criterion of historical context. However, there is at least one other aspect of historical context to consider.

Put simply, Jesus wasn’t exactly the first Jew to be crucified on a Roman cross. Nor was he the first Jew widely considered by other Jews to have been crucified unjustly. By the time of Jesus’ death, the Romans had been in charge of the Jewish homeland for nearly a century, and countless Jews had suffered martyrdom and persecution under their Roman overlords. This imperial oppression, in fact, was the primary impetus for Jesus’ entire life and message. You can’t possibly understand Jesus without understanding the Roman-Jewish context in which he lived and worked. Jesus’ message was prompted by resistance to the systemic evil of Roman commercialism and oppression, and Jewish high priestly collaboration with that oppression, in the first part of the first century C.E.

The point to be taken here is that plenty of pious Jews had been unjustly executed on Roman crosses long before Jesus ever came on the scene. In that sense, it is not difficult to imagine that Jesus may have used cross imagery in some of his teachings – such as the Take Up Your Cross saying at issue in this essay. If that’s the case, then this may indeed be an authentic saying of the historical Jesus, but I would argue that Jesus was likely referring to these pious Jewish martyrs, and not necessarily to his own future death. It only became about his own demise after he was executed.

So we have seen that Take Up Your Cross passes the criterion of multiple independent attestations, and might also pass the criterion of historical context. If it passes both, then I would be inclined to argue that this saying likely did come from the lips of the historical Jesus. But that second criterion is, for me, tentative at best, and I am more inclined to argue that Jesus probably never made this statement. The strength of the metaphorical cross imagery is simply too strong, too perfect, to imagine that it goes back to Jesus himself. As I noted above, only after his execution would the image of the cross have provided a powerful religious metaphor for Christians. Prior to that, a Roman execution device would hardly have been seen as religiously powerful, earlier Jewish martyrdoms notwithstanding.

As I alluded to above, all of this deals with the mode of the story: is it historically accurate – did it come from the lips of the historical Jesus – or was it created by Christians attempting to understand Jesus in light of his execution and their belief in his resurrection? I’ve given my own, albeit tentative, opinion on this, but what matters most is not the mode, but the meaning. What does the Take Up Your Cross saying mean for us as Christians?

I quoted my friend’s opinion above, and I noted that my own perspective was different. For me, Take Up Your Cross is an instruction that encourages Christians to follow Jesus on the Way. The Way was the euphemism used by early Christians to describe the Christian lifestyle – the path of God’s kingdom as illuminated by Jesus of Nazareth (“Narrow is the gate and difficult is the Way” as Jesus says in Matthew 7:14). In modern English translations, the euphemism is frequently lost because the word is often translated as “road,” giving the implication of a physical street. (Consider the story of blind Bartimaeus from Mark 11:46-52. After being healed of his blindness, many modern translations tells us that Bartimaeus “followed Jesus along the road” as he made his way to Jerusalem. What that passage really says is that Bartimaeus, after being made to see by Jesus, “followed Jesus on the Way” – in other words, he became one of Jesus’ disciples, “taking up his cross,” as it were, and following him to Jerusalem).

“The Way” is Jesus’ lifestyle of compassion and selflessness, love and mercy, openness and togetherness, acceptance and grace. It is a path diametrically, but nonviolently, opposed to the status quo and the powers that be, opposed to the systemic evils of the world, evils that oppress people and mock God’s desire for social justice. It is a nonviolent resistance to oppression and domination, cruelty and coercion – in short, the status quo of human civilization.

This is what “take up your cross” means for me. It means following Jesus on the Way, a path opposed to civilization’s violent and oppressive normalcy of power and greed, revenge and malice, self-interest and avarice.

Early Christian Practice

Caught up as we often in are in our daily lives, routines, and little corners of the world, we frequently fail to take the time to reflect much on our own religious practices. This is especially true for those Christians like me who have been associated with one denomination, and therefore one denominational tradition, throughout their lives.

Whatever our personal denominational preference is, we tend to think of those worship traditions as the norm. While many of us realize that these worship traditions had some starting point in the past and haven’t just existed for all time, we tend to go through life as though they did. We may fail to recognize that for the first three or four centuries of Christian history, there was basically no organized and institutionalized form of Christian practice. There were no Protestants at all, and those who would become “Catholics” represented only a small subset of the greater Christian world. Catholicism as we know it today did not come to control Christianity in principle until the mid 300’s C.E. and in practice until the 400’s C.E. That means that for the first 350 years or so of Christian history, Christianity looked remarkably different than any form of Christianity that exists today.

It might be easy to gloss that over, and we frequently do just that. When discussing ancient history, to sum up an entire block of several hundred years with just a word or two is common. Yet 400 years is a very long time. Imagine trying to sum up American history with just a sentence or two - and U.S. history only goes back about 250 years. The period of early Christianity at issue here is nearly twice that long. To those countless generations of Christians who lived during that very long period of time, their lives, beliefs, and practices certainly were not reducible to a footnote of history.

So let’s take a look at what those early forms of Christianity looked like.

FIRST CENTURY

Most of our texts in the New Testament come from the 1st century. Assuming Jesus died in roughly 30 C.E., that means the 1st century represents the first 70 years or so of Christian history. How did Christian practice look during that earliest era?

The Eucharist, or Lord’s Supper, appears to have been a ritual practiced among Christians from a very early time. It is discussed by the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, written in the 50’s C.E. His words on this are familiar to many Christians, as they are routinely spoken liturgically during Lord’s Supper celebrations.

But while the Lord’s Supper/Eucharist today consists of a simple ritualistic ceremony – performed in some churches each week, in other churches only once per month – for early Christians, it was an entire ritual meal. Paul says:

When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s Supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk.

While this passage gives an interesting glimpse into a problem at the Corinthian church, in a more general sense it allows us to see what the Lord’s Supper ritual was like. It was a full meal of food and drink that the Church ate together. It was, essentially, a 1st century potluck, only with much more liturgical, ritualistic, and theological purpose.

How often did they eat this ritualistic complete meal? There is no indisputable answer, but it was almost certainly at least once a week. In the book of Acts, from roughly 90 C.E., the writer mentions that he and his companions “broke bread” on the first day of the week (Sunday). Other 1st century texts, such as the teaching text called the Didache, imply that it was a meal eaten at every gathering. The Didache calls it the “Thanksgiving meal,” and provides instructions on prayers that should accompany it. It says that Christians should gather together “every day” and “eat a meal,” giving thanks and confessing sins in the process. This same text asserts that only those who have been “baptized” can take part in this most holy of meals.

Baptism, of course, seems also to have been one of the earliest Christian rituals. The Didache instructs its congregation to baptize in cold, “living” water. “Living” water was a euphemism for running water (such as a stream or river). It conceded, however, that the still waters of a pond or lake would suffice if no living water was available. It even went so far as to permit pouring three jugs of water on a person’s head, if neither living nor still water could be found. It also asserted that both the “overseer” performing the ritual, and the new convert receiving it, should fast for “one or two days” prior to the baptism.

For the community that produced the Gospel of John, baptism was so important that Jesus is found to say: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.” For those 1st century Christians, baptism was an integral part of receiving the Holy Spirit. Luke makes this explicit when he has Jesus say, in Acts, that John the Baptist baptized with water, but Christians will be “baptized with the Holy Spirit.” The writer of 1 Peter promises that baptism is a pledge to God and part of the path of salvation.

Another aspect of 1st century Christian practice was communal living. The writer of Acts says explicitly that the earliest communities of Christians “would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” The Didache agrees: “Share all things with your brother, and never say that your possessions are exclusively your own, because if you share in eternal things, how much more in things that are temporary?”

For that same Didache community, fasting was an integral part of Christian life. The Didache instructs its listeners to fast on Wednesday and Friday of each week (explicitly saying not to fast on Monday and Thursday, since this is when “hypocrites” fast).

Prophecy and speaking in tongues is yet another early aspect of Christian practice. Paul and other New Testament writers talk about this phenomenon as part of regular worship services, as does the Didache. The Didache even gives explicit instructions about how to know true prophecy from false prophecy.

SECOND CENTURY

As we move into the second century, we have more history to work from in terms of understanding what early Christian communities looked like. It was during the second century that Gnostic forms of Christianity began to flourish, and thanks to a number of archaeological discoveries of the last 100 years or so, much of their literature is known to modern scholarship.

First, it is apparent that 2nd century Christian groups propagated a lot of “secret knowledge.” To use a modern euphemism, they were big on divine secrets. These secrets, of course, were frequently attributed to teachings Jesus had given one-on-one to various apostles. In a letter that Clement, bishop of Alexandria, wrote to a man named Theodore in the mid-2nd century, there is a discussion of what has come to be known as the “Secret Gospel of Mark.” Clement says that Mark wrote down his Gospel – presumably an early form of the one we know today – but that after Peter died, Mark came to the church in Alexandria and expanded on his book, adding in secret stories and accounts. This “secret” version of Mark was fiercely protected by the Alexandrian church, its content given only to initiates deemed spiritually worthy of receiving it.

According to Clement’s letter, however, their secret text got stolen by an opposing group of Christians called the Carpocratians. This group, in turn, corrupted the teachings of the secret text and began using it to assert ideas that Clement found highly offensive. One of these ideas was, apparently, that Jesus initiated secret teachings to his male followers in rituals that included homosexual sex.

This same group of Christians, according to a later Christian writer, had a painting of Jesus that they claimed had been made by Pontius Pilate, and which they used as part of their religious rites and celebrations.

Not all Gnostic groups were quite as bizarre as that. In the 2nd century, in fact, many scholars assert that most forms of Christian practice were essentially Gnostic. Catholic or “orthodox” Christianity certainly existed in the 2nd century, but it was not yet institutionalized and it was not the “mainstream” form of Christian practice.

Gnostics believed that the Hebrew god of the Old Testament was actually a lesser, evil god. He had created this world of sin and depravity, and now the one true God of the universe – a being completely unknowable – had sent his light into the world through Jesus so that Christians could figure out the secret, mysterious way of escaping this world of sin and returning to the ground of their perfect being. Gnosticism was an inherently “internal” religion of self-discovery leading to salvation. God is within you. It contrasted the “orthodox” view that salvation was attained through faith. God is outside of you.

Fasting continued to be a common practice among Christians of the 2nd century. The Christian leader Ptolemy, writing in the mid-2nd century, says: “Among us, external fasting is also observed, since it can be advantageous to the soul if it is done reasonably, not for imitating others or from habit or because of a special day appointed for this purpose.” This indicates that while fasting was still a common ritual, the group represented by Ptolemy did not care much for strict rules regulating days of fasting, as we saw in the Didache.

Other Christian groups of the 2nd century followed extreme forms of hedonism. Iranaeus, bishop of Lyons in the late 2nd century, writes of Christian groups that took the issue of faith and works to the extreme. These groups agreed so strongly with the notion that salvation comes solely from faith, apart from works, that they felt no compunction to follow moralistic codes. Of course, these forms of “hedonism” would seem mild to us today: eating food sacrificed to idols (a big no-no for folks like Iranaeus), sex outside of marriage, and groups of women and men living together in the same home (which Iranaeus took to mean they were obviously engaging in orgies).

Other groups took it further, however. The Cainites, who were especially enamored with Adam’s son Cain, believed so strongly that the body was a shell of evil that they pursued worldly pleasures to the full, in order to defile the sinful body and essentially destroy it.

From the Gospel of Phillip in the middle of the 2nd century, we find that the group who produced this text used three “temples” in its ritual practice. The first was called the “baptism,” the second “redemption,” and the third the “bridal chamber.” It is not clear whether the ritual in the bridal chamber included ritual sex, although this was certainly suspected by other Christians of the era. Iranaeus gives us a description of what took place there:

A few of them prepare a bridal chamber and in it go through a form of consecration, employing certain fixed formulae, which are repeated over the person to be initiated, and stating that a spiritual marriage is to be performed after the pattern of the higher [celestial beings].

These higher celestial beings were called “aeons,” and were believed to be emanations of God into the world. The bridal chamber, then, re-enacted the sexual union of these Godly emanations. The community that produced the Gospel of Phillip was probably the Valentinian community. The Valentinians were “mainstream” Gnostics who followed the hierarchies of priest and bishop, and who practiced the doctrines and dogmas of the emerging Church, but who taught a path of spiritual enlightenment beyond those organized structures. Just as Buddhist teachings are frequently likened to a raft that gets the practitioner to the other side and is then abandoned, so the doctrines and dogmas and structures of Christianity were there only for the novice. Once spiritual enlightenment had been attained, those rules and regulations could be left behind because they were no longer valuable or necessary.

During the early part of the 2nd century, we also begin to see descriptions of Christians from outside Christianity. In a series of letters sent between Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia and the emperor Trajan, we get our first “Roman” discussion of Christianity. Pliny has had some run-ins with Christians in his region, and has put them on trial. He gives us a nice glimpse at what Christian practice looked like in his region in the first decade of the 2nd century:

[Christians] were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath…When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food.

Pliny goes on to mention “two female slaves” who he refers to as “deaconesses” among the Christians.

Later in the 2nd century, we have another Roman perspective, this time from the philosopher Fronto: “They know one another by secret marks and insignia, and they love one another almost before they know one another…They call one another…brothers and sisters.” He goes on to accuse these Christians of “loving the head of a donkey” and of being obsessed with the genitalia of their priests and bishops. These are no doubt vicious rumors he has heard, and he concedes this by saying: “I know not whether these things are false.” Whether true or not, he says, suspicion of such things is fairly aroused because of Christianity’s tendency to engage in “secret and nocturnal rites.”

Fronto doesn’t stop there, however. He recounts an initiation rite of novice Christians that he says is “well known.”

An infant covered over with meal, that it may deceive the unwary, is placed before him who is to be stained with their rites: this infant is slain by the young pupil, who has been urged on as if to harmless blows on the surface of the meal, with dark and secret wounds. Thirstily – O horror! – they lick up its blood; eagerly they divide its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together…

Might Christian groups of the 2nd century actually have practiced such things? It is difficult to say with any certainty, but the later Christian writer who quotes these passages from Fronto certainly didn’t think so.

Fronto also speaks of the meal tradition of Christianity. Like the initiation rite of child murder that he says is well known, he says their tradition of meal sharing is spoken of by people “everywhere.”

On a solemn day they assemble at the feast, with all their children, sisters, mothers, people of every sex and of every age. There, after much feasting, when the fellowship has grown warm, and the fervor of incestuous lust has grown hot with drunkenness, a dog that has been tied to the chandelier is provoked to rush and spring, by throwing a small piece of offal beyond the length of a line by which he is bound; and thus the conscious light being overturned and extinguished in the shameless darkness, the connections of abominable lust involve them in the uncertainty of fate.

Again, is it possible that some Christian groups topped off the Lord’s Supper celebration with a good old fashioned orgy? It’s possible, I suppose, but Fronto’s words sound more polemical than historical. In either case, it is clear that Christian rituals, carried on in secret and with esoteric liturgies and mysterious language, aroused suspicion in mainstream culture, and gave rise to all manner of rumor and speculation.

If we can separate polemics from history, these comments from Fronto may allow us to speculate about how some Christian groups practiced their faith in the 2nd century. Take, for instance, Fronto’s comment that Christians “loved the head of a donkey.” One might imagine Christian groups of the 2nd century re-enacting Palm Sunday as part of the Easter celebrations. That re-enactment would no doubt have included ritually riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, as Jesus is said to have done in the Gospels. Perhaps this led Christians to be associated with donkeys – that most Jewish of animals.

As for obsessions with the genitals of priests, it is not out of the question to assume that some Christian groups may have fused ancient fertility cults with Christian practice. As outlined above, this was a charge made against some Christian groups by other Christian groups. Fertility cults, of course, typically engaged in various forms of ritual sex. The erect penis is known as a symbol of fertility cults from across antiquity. Fronto, with his “modern” Roman values, was righteously indignant over such superstition and ancient tribalism, much like we would be today if faced with a similar situation. In that sense, he shared the feelings of Christians like Iranaeus and other “heresy hunters” of the early Christian era.

As for the charge of cannibalism, this was, no doubt, related to the ritual of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. Perhaps Fronto’s account of cannibalism, mixed with infanticide, is a polemical fusion of the Eucharist, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac in the Old Testament. It’s difficult to imagine a Christian group (or any group, for that matter) enacting such a ritual, but Fronto is not the only one who suggests it. Church fathers writing as late as the 4th century made similar charges against some Christian groups, as we will see below.

Finally, we get an intimate glimpse at the lifestyle of some 2nd century Christians from the Christian writer Justin Martyr. Justin wrote around 150 C.E., and he is the earliest of the “Church fathers” for whom we have a significant amount of existing writings. He said the following:

We, who once took pleasure in fornication, now embrace self-control. We, who valued the acquisition of wealth and possessions above everything else, now put what we have into a common fund, and share with everyone in need. We, who hated and killed one another, and would not share our lives with certain people because of their ethnic differences from us, now live intimately with them.

Clearly as late as the mid-2nd century, many Christian groups were still living in the communal style of the earliest Christians a century earlier.

THIRD CENTURY AND LATER

Christian practice through these centuries seems to have mirrored much of the previous eras, though with an increase in regulation and institutionalism. Fringe groups tended to die out (especially those that condemned procreation) and mainstream groups tended to strengthen in numbers, leading to tighter structure and unity.

Discussion raged during these centuries of the nature of Jesus. While some groups insisted Jesus was equal to God, others claimed Jesus was divine in his own right, but still subject to God. Jesus’ humanity, especially, was at issue during this time. Some said Jesus was both fully human and fully God. Others asserted that Jesus was not human at all, but only appeared to be human, because God can’t suffer and die like Jesus did on the cross. Still others argued that Jesus was only human, with God simply working through him in a unique and mysterious way.

It was during this time in the 3rd and 4th centuries that Christians began using the familiar “sign of the cross” – a hand movement meant to symbolize the cross of Christ. It differed, however, from the familiar four-point movement known to Catholicism today. Tertullian, writing in the early part of the 3rd century, says:

In all our coming in and going out, in putting on our shoes, at the bath, at the table, in lighting our candles, in lying down, in sitting down, whatever employment occupies us, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross.

This ritual movement crossed only the forehead, not the whole body, and instead of using three fingers, only the thumb was used. Furthermore, the sign consisted of only three points, not four – it mimicked the Greek letter tau, which is known to us as T.

In regards to baptismal rites in the 3rd century, early Christian writers left rather detailed accounts of how this ritual was carried out. Prayer and fasting would precede the day of baptism. The baptism itself would typically take place on Easter, with all new initiates of the previous year being baptized together. The overseer would ask the initiate if he or she renounced the devil and his angels. The initiate would respond three times in the affirmative. After that, the initiates would step naked into the water, up to their necks. The overseer would then ritually call down the spirit of God on those being baptized, and the initiates – having now received the Holy Spirit – would emerge from the water to be clothed in a robe of white linen. They would also be given ritual food – milk and honey – which not only symbolized the food of the Promised Land from Jewish scriptures, but, as scholar Elaine Pagels says, also symbolized “baby food” being given to these newborns in Christ.

During this era, we again see rather outrageous accusations against fringe Christian practice. Epiphanius, writing in the early 300’s, referred to a Christian sect he called the “Borborites” who replaced the bread and wine of the Eucharist with semen and menstrual blood, which they smeared on themselves and then consumed. This practice may have been an extreme form of a God/Wisdom duality, with menstrual blood representing female wisdom, and semen representing male divinity.

Epiphanius also accuses these Christians of infanticide and cannibalism, going so far as to say that they would kill and eat the babies created from their ritual sex acts. This sounds so similar to what we saw above from the pagan Fronto that one wonders if Epiphanius actually got the story from Fronto’s writings. That may be a possibility, but more than likely these sorts of rumors about the more fringe and secretive sects of Christianity were commonplace. It is difficult to know for certain whether they represent true ritual practices or mere rumor and polemics.

CONCLUSION

When we look at the earliest eras of Christianity – a time period spanning several hundred years – we find that Christian practice was as diverse then as it is now. Furthermore, hardly any of it resembles the rituals and liturgies that we take for granted in the modern church. We still baptize, we still eat the Lord’s Supper, and we still celebrate Easter, but our methods for enacting those ancient rituals share only the barest similarities with the earliest generations of Christians.

When I envision the earliest Christian communities – those communities for whom Jesus was only as “ancient” as Wilbur and Orville Wright are for us – I imagine a group of humble believers, separated from mainstream society, living communally and sharing all their possessions and profits with one another, meeting together at dawn on Sunday – the Lord’s Day – for prayer, prophecy, and teachings from scripture, sharing a ritual Eucharist meal each evening, greeting one another as brother and sister, crossing their foreheads in piety as they go about their daily activities, and viewing their entire existence as part of the in-breaking kingdom of God. For these earliest Christians, Christianity wasn’t just a profession of faith, it was an entire way of life, reconciled not to the world, but to God.