THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE INVENTION OF CHRISTIANITY

Christianity provided the moral and intellectual framework within which the medieval search for wisdom in western Europe was conducted. It became a monolithic framework, though neither as rigid nor as intolerant of pagan ideas as is often supposed. Yet the rise of Christianity was built on multiple layers of happenstance and irony. Jesus was an obscure and illiterate Jewish prophet from the tiny rural village of Nazareth who preached the repentance of sins and the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures. His disciples were Jewish. His target audience, with rare exceptions, was Jewish. Some thought he was the promised Messiah — the new King David — who would drive out the pagan Roman oppressors and, with God's direct intervention, reestablish a Jewish kingdom and restore the lost tribes of Israel. Jesus himself preached an apocalyptic vision derived from John the Baptist — he thought the end of the known world was near and that God would soon come in all his glory to punish the wicked and reward the pious. Jesus presented himself as God's last messenger before the coming day of judgment.

None of this came to pass, of course. No Jewish kingdom was established, the end of the world did not come, and neither the wicked were punished nor the good exalted. When Jesus created a disturbance at the Temple in Jerusalem, the worried high priest, responsible for maintaining good order, turned Jesus over to the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, who responded quickly and brutally. Jesus was crucified for pretending to be — or perhaps just because others acclaimed him as — the King of the Jews. The crucifixion itself attracted little notice. It was a common occurrence; two other perceived troublemakers were crucified with Jesus that same day. Jesus posed no real threat, as evidenced by the fact that Pontius Pilate did not even bother to move against his followers. But wild talk and public demonstrations were enough to warrant maximum punishment, particularly during the festival of Passover, when Jerusalem was filled with restless pilgrims reasserting their identity as the chosen people of God.

The Jews of Jerusalem quickly lost interest in Jesus despite the vigorous efforts of his brother James and various disciples. For them, the notion of a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. Jesus's death on the cross was, in itself, sufficient proof that his message was false, notwithstanding claims about his subsequent resurrection. The Jews of Jerusalem went back to waiting for their true Messiah, the successor of King David, who would restore the Jewish people to prominence and autonomy. Some forty years later, an attempted revolt led by a Jewish nationalist sect known as the Zealots enjoyed some initial success. But it ended in the devastation of Jerusalem and the destruction of its Temple by the Romans, an event that, remarkably enough, Jesus appears to have predicted, though he thought it was God who would destroy the then-current Temple and rebuild it as the centerpiece of his kingdom on Earth.

The disciples had somewhat more success spreading the words and deeds of Jesus among the Hellenized Jews of the Diaspora who were scattered throughout the Mediterranean. Eventually, however, it was among the Gentiles — that is, the non-Israelite peoples — of the Roman Empire that his message took hold. The disciples adapted his words to fit the new audience. A spiritual kingdom of heaven for all persons began to displace prophecies of the imminent, earthly, Jewish one that was anathema to Rome. Tales of Jesus's miracles grew, and his resurrection became the central event that transformed the death on the cross from a punishment for sedition into a victory over death and a symbol of atonement for the sins of humankind. The story of his resurrection transformed Jesus himself from a Nazarene peasant, with no pretentions beyond carrying God's message to his chosen people, into the divine Christ, true God and true man, one in being with the Father.

Saul of Tarsus, a Jew and self-confessed persecutor of the early Christians, was the man most responsible for this transformation. Following his dramatic encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, the newly christened Paul proselytized tirelessly among the Gentiles and divorced the message of Christ from the laws of the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus himself said he came to fulfill the scriptures, not to challenge or change them. But Paul absolved Gentile adherents from circumcision, temple sacrifice, dietary restrictions, and other requirements of the Jewish faith. Paul had little interest in the historical Jesus; his writings, or those attributed to him — which are the earliest in the New Testament and comprise thirteen of its twenty-seven books — celebrate the theological construction that is the risen Christ.

Gradually, a new religion was created rather than an ancient one fulfilled. The gospels themselves were written from thirty to seventy years after the death of Jesus by people who did not know him directly but relied on frequently repeated oral accounts and other, now lost sources. Jesus preached in Aramaic. The gospels were written in Greek. The new Christians retained the Old Testament and claimed it as their own — somewhat as Rome clung to the myth that it owed its origins to ancient Troy. A massive effort was even undertaken to find passages in the Old Testament that were fulfilled in Jesus. Accounts of Jesus's life (such as the birth in Bethlehem and the flight into Egypt) were then reshaped based not on history but on theology.

But the Old and New Testaments — with their very different Gods and very different messages — rest uneasily between the covers of the same volume. In an important sense, Christianity merged together Hebrew and Greek, Jerusalem and Athens. Both the Jewish and classical traditions have been vitally important to Western culture. But the God-Man of the New Testament is antithetical to traditional Jewish religion. As Christianity spread, it was increasingly divorced from its Jewish origins and, indeed, even became hostile to those origins. As one recent writer has properly noted, "the more the movement was shaped by these new 'pagan' converts, the more forcefully it discarded its Jewish past for a Graeco-Roman future." It is one of the deepest and most painful ironies of history that the Jewish liberation movement begun by Jesus was gradually transformed into one with anti-Semitic...