By David Gushee
My Christmas week reflections are inspired by a brilliant 25-year-old book by historian Robert L. Wilken. I picked up The Christians as the Romans Saw Them in hopes of finding resources for my research on the sanctity of life. I thought that Wilken might reveal the extent to which the Romans noticed the unique early Christian commitment to protecting human life.
David Gushee
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Instead, the book focuses on five pagan observers who offered a barrage of criticisms of the young religion. The five critics in chronological order were Pliny, Galen, Celsus, Porphyry and Julian, and each critic was more sophisticated and devastating in his critique than the one before.
I was especially struck by learning about Julian, an apostate Christian who attacked the faith with the unique resources available only to a Roman emperor (361-363) who had previously been a Christian. Julian’s critiques of Christianity were seen as so devastating that efforts were still being made to refute them long after his death. One Christian observer said that Julian’s books had “disturbed many and done much harm” and that even those strong in faith had been troubled.
Here on the eve of Christmas it was fascinating to learn that from a learned pagan perspective it was precisely our claims related to the divinity of Jesus that featured centrally in Julian’s attacks. Working from the New Testament and writing amidst intense doctrinal disputes among Christians, Julian claims that only the evangelist John attests the divinity of Christ, that Jesus himself never made such a claim, and that the idea was a late Christian invention. Turning to the Old Testament, Julian argues that Moses “taught that there was only one God” and that the idea of a divine Son of God is totally alien to Jewish thought, as Jews themselves had long said.
This latter point dovetails with what Wilken sees as Julian’s most damaging criticism of Christianity — that it was essentially an apostasy from Judaism. Julian himself had mixed feelings about Judaism. He believed that it was essentially a tribal-national religion that made unnecessarily grandiose claims about its deity and its own special place in the cosmos, but Roman thinkers tended to value tradition and at least respected Judaism as an internally coherent tribal religion of great antiquity.
Christianity, on the other hand, had according to Julian essentially borrowed and wrecked the Jewish heritage. It claimed to be the true successor to biblical Judaism but abandoned both its theological essentials and its ancient practices such as obedience to Torah.
In the most astonishing discovery I made in reading this book, Wilken reports that Julian decided to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in order to strike at the way Christian apologists used the destruction of the Temple as verification of Christian truth claims about both Judaism and itself.
Julian died before he could carry out this plan. The Temple never was rebuilt. But his criticisms exposed fairly early the way in which patristic-era Christianity tragically built its intellectual case for our faith on a supersessionist reading of Judaism.
Wilken speaks of Christianity’s “bad conscience” in relation to Judaism, and we now know the destructive implications in history of the defining of Christianity as negation, displacement, and supersession of Judaism. It has only been after the Holocaust that some Christian theologians and traditions have sought ways to disentangle Christianity from anti-Judaism.
It is striking to learn that few of the intellectual criticisms thrown at Christianity are altogether new. Questions about our belief in special revelation, the incarnation, the resurrection, the divinity of Christ, the trustworthiness of the Bible, our relationship with Judaism and the relation of faith and reason are not at all new.
Nor are criticisms that a serious Christianity undercuts national loyalty because it teaches adherents to love Jesus and each other more than any state, tribe, or people. Wilken shows that this kind of transnational religion was indeed a fundamentally new thing in human history, and as Christianity grew in numbers it was viewed as a mortal threat by many thoughtful Roman observers.
Christianity was persecuted not because most Roman leaders couldn’t handle religious diversity, but because they could not accept a kind of diversity that taught people to detach from primary loyalty to the Empire, its sponsoring deities and its way of life.
I am among those who teach that precisely this detachment is a non-negotiable aspect of our faith. But I see that it is just as destabilizing to nations and tribes now as it was then. Christians will always feel both internal and external pressures to resort to nationalized religion, and this corrupted form of the faith is the version most prevalent in the United States.