E-Book Content
MESSIAN IS M A ND E P I PHANY: AN ESSAY ON THE OR I G I NS OF CHRISTIANITY Max Rieser Philosophical Currents Vol. 9 David H. DeGrood Editor Edward D'Angelo James Lawler Marvin Farber Benjamin B. Page Mitchell Franklin Dale Riepe Stuart L. Hackel Shingo Shibata Donald C. Hodges William G. Stratton Associates The important views expressed by our writers are represented without necessarily implying concurrence of either editors or publisher. B. R. Gr Uner B.V. Amsterdam - 1973 Messianism and Epiphany: An Essay on the Origins of Christianity by Dr. Max Rieser B. R. Gr iiner B.V. - Amsterdam - 1 973 Libra ry of Congres s Cata log Ca rd Number 73-88495 ISBN c 90 6032 023 9 DR. MAX RIESER Printed in Hungary The acceptance of the Christian faith by Constantine I and then the force ful conversion to it of the inhabita nts of the Roman Empire are perhaps one of the m ost momentous events of ancient history. It is also baffl ing since it is incomprehensible why the highly civilized Hellenistic-Roman world took over the foundations of its faith from a relatively small people, the Judaeans, who were not very well liked, but rather an object of general hate and scorn. Their customs provoked the historian Tacitus to call "mos ludaeorum sordi dus atque absurdus " ; a Roman satirical poet said scornfully, "Credat Iudae us Apella." (This may the Jew Apella believe.) Thus they were decried in Rome as superstitious, and St. Luke uttered a similar opinion, when he said, in the Acts of the Apostles that, while the Greeks ask for reasons, the Judaeans ask for miracles (signs of the deity). The Romans were quite recep tive to foreign beliefs, yet Tacitus spoke of Christian beliefs as an evil, and stated that the origin of this evil (origo huius mali) was Judea, and it came to Rome where all the dregs of the commonwealth (sentina rei publicae) are in confluence. But the reception of Christianity was a long process which took ten genera tions, and when this was accomplished Tacitus was no longer alive ; the cul ture of the Hellenistic world declined sharply and the fortunes of Christia nity rose. But it was always a creed of the lower classes, not of the intellec tual elite, which always opposed it. When St. Paul allegedly wrote his mas terwork, the Letter to the Romans, he did address himself only to the Greek speaking people of Rome, which had more than half a million slaves in its walls, rather more than half of its inhabitants. It is to these lowly people that the Christians spoke, and what they were presented with was a sort o f anthro� pomorphized, vulgarized Platonism . The difficulty of disentangling the ori gins of Christianity is due to its connection with theological doctrines and powerful institutions, furthermore to literary documents whose authors are mostly unknown, and which came to us in an altered shape. They were com piled, rewritten, interpolated, etc., many times. Christianity had no single founder, but was a collective enterprise of the working lower middle classes. Christ, its heros eponymos, died allegedly the lowly death of a slave. This has certainly symbol.ic meaning, it means that God assumed in his "son " the form of a slave, at least in his death; in life he was allegedly a carpenter, a craftsman, as were many Judaean teachers of the Torah. But he was not a Judean, rather a Galilean, 5 and so were all his pupils, with the exception of Juda who was a traitor to him. The fact, that St. Paul played a prominent role in the doctrinal formation of Christian beliefs, shows that the Judaeans, in an ethnical sense, had an important part in it, but since the soil of Palestine