Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea
by Geza VermesYale University PressThe great Oxford scholar Geza Vermes, in his new book Christian Beginnings, continues his gentle dissent from the ideological tyranny of Johannine Christology. Readers familiar with Vermes' work will know the outlines of his thought from his famous trumpet-blast Jesus the Jew (1973); Christian Beginnings is an echo of that earlier work, elaborating Vermes' conception of the Jewish tradition of charismatic prophets constantly pumping new life-blood into Jewish faith. He sees the historical Jesus as very much in line with the tradition of such figures as Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha - a fiery revisionist preacher, handy with signs and wonders.Today's Christians will see the problem right away. Their Jesus isn't an argumentative Jewish preacher; he's the Lord of Lords, the Prince of Peace, the Ruler of the Universe as part (and also all) of the Holy Trinity. Professor Geza sees this as a basically political transformation effected by Christianity's first businessman, St. Paul. As he comments, "Paul transformed the God-centered religion of Jesus into a Christ-centered Christianity."The conflict was brought to a boil by the 4th century Alexandrian priest Arius, who wrote a series of books declaring that Jesus, despite flatly saying "I and my Father are one and the same," was not equal to God, that he was made by God and therefore not eternal, that he was separate from and less than God. Arius' arguments were remorselessly developed and laid out with total clarity (as Vermes wryly quips, such total clarity is "perhaps not a true desiderata in theology"), and they caused the Eastern Church to erupt in fury like a kicked beehive. Arius was excommunicated, but when Constantine the Great ordered that the squabble be solved, Arius had his excommunication excommunicated so that he could attend the Council of Nicaea ("the first ever ecumenical council of Christianity") in 325. Roughly 200 of the 1800 invitees attended the council (Pope Sylvester declined), and the verdict was loudly, brutally in favor of homoousios, the dogma of consubstantiality - that Jesus is God, and God temporarily became Jesus in order to redeem mankind, etc. Only a little while after Nicaea, the Church declared Arianism a heresy and began systematically suppressing it. The Nicene Creed became the order of the day, as Vermes somberly points out:
The [post-Nicaea] theologians carried on to underplay the image of Jesus of Nazareth, the itinerant preacher who in days long gone by was crisscrossing the rocky paths of Galilee, preaching the imminent arrival of the day of the Lord, and to overstress instead his shiny new identity as the consubstantial, co-eternal and co-equal only-begotten Son of God the Father.
And for him, that "shiny new identity" represents a saddening change:
The idea of consubstantiality never occurred to any of the leading representatives of Christianity prior to 325; it would have indeed sounded anathema. By contrast, after 325 the claim of inequality between Father and Son amounted to heresy. After that surprising volte-face, membership of the church primarily depended on adherence to the Nicene Creed. Intellectual assent to dogma gained precedence over the heart's openness to charisma urged by the historical Jesus.
This is thought-provoking as always, if slightly uncharitable (post-Nicaea Christian writings have contained some highlights a bit too personal and passionate to be fairly lumped under the bland heading of "assent to dogma"). Christianity's shift from traditional Jewish charismatic preaching to an eschatologically inspired full-blown religion is a dire thing indeed from the standpoint of world history and sheer tonnage of human misery, but it's always also been more interesting than Professor Vermes tends to grant. Even so, Christian Beginnings adds another extremely worthwhile volume to one man's lifelong study of the shift itself.
