17.12.1998
Jesus: from Jewish apocalyptic revolutionary to imperial god
Jack Conrad describes how an ideology of the oppressed became the ideology of the oppressors
Britain as a modern nation was founded on the cultural and constitutional basis of counterpoising protestant to catholic Christianity. Today the official religion of the United Kingdom remains a nationalised form of Christianity. The BBC broadcasts daily Christian services and homilies. In state schools our children are taught the myths of the New Testament as if they were verified fact or, at the very least, that Jesus was some sort of well meaning founder of an admirable new religion. Britain’s warships, bomber planes and army units are blessed in his hallowed name. Archbishops and bishops of the Church of England, the lords spiritual, sit by “ancient usage and statute” in parliament. Royal weddings and state funerals are conducted according to high church ritual. And of course, Elizabeth Windsor, head of state, is also head of the church.
True, over the last 50 years or so regular church attendance by the mass of the population has plummeted. Nevertheless top politicians find it advantageous to parade their irrational convictions. Tony Blair is a well publicised cult member (when not receiving communion at his wife’s Roman Catholic Church). Unwilling to be outpointed in terms of pseudo-morality, William Hague rediscovered the affinity of the Tory Party to C of E Christianity (nowadays New Labour at prayer). Regrettably it is not just a contest within the higher echelons of the establishment. Tony Benn readily confesses his Christian beliefs, as does Arthur Scargill.
An imagined personality of Jesus is therefore used as a vehicle for just about every mainstream point of view. Thus we have a tough, but caring New Labour Jesus who tells the sick to get up and walk, a Conservative Jesus ruling as king in heaven, an Old Labour Jesus meekly preaching social justice and a Scargillite Jesus deserted by cowardly disciples. The historic Jesus is of no concern. Nor is the real emergence and evolution of the Christian religion - except, it seems, for us Marxists.
Not that we should be smug. Some comrades from within our tradition argue that with the seemingly relentless forward march of technology and science - itself a modern phenomenon - religious ideas are bound to undergo a natural and deserved death. Such vulgar evolutionism is profoundly mistaken. In itself it is a secular form of religion (ie, an idealist worship of the means of production). Take the United States. Here is the richest and most capitalistically advanced country on the planet (to use István Mészáros’ perceptive emphasis). It is also one of the most religious. There is, in other words, no automatic correlation between the progress or modernisation of the productive forces and the diminution of religious superstition. Indeed, as capitalist social relations become ever more alienated, increasing numbers search for hope and solace not only in astrology, drugs, the lottery and the clap trap of new age mysticism, but old-time religion too. The perceived failure of working class politics and the whole socialist project can only but increase the felt need for a soul in a soulless world.
All this makes it vital to intellectually challenge the Jesus myth in the name of human liberation and through a materialist theory reveal the real historical man. Communist politics is about more than strikes, student grants and other so-called bread and butter issues. A prerequisite for anything decisive is securing ideological hegemony. By definition that involves as much the past as the present. History, therefore, is a weapon, either for revolution or reaction.
Where we require the unvarnished truth about history with all its different social formations, antagonisms, violent ruptures and democratic movements, our rulers need myth, seamless apologetics and resignation. To maintain and reproduce domination in the realm of ideas the bourgeoisie employ, flatter and promote all manner of philosophers, academics, theologians, journalists and broadcasters. These dons and divines, pundits and post-modernists manufacture or propagate a history which downplays or obliterates those below. Capitalism is presented as the natural order or the last word in civilisation. Piecemeal change is their totem. Revolution only brings disaster and disappointment. Revolutions and revolutionaries are therefore with equal disingenuousness derevolutionised or demonised.
Here in Britain the revolutionary past of the bourgeoisie is denied by being remade as other. Aristocratic cavaliers are the dashing heroes of biography, film and novel. Roundheads become dour proto-Stalinites. Charles I is bumbling but well-meaning, inoffensive and courageous, Oliver Cromwell narrow-minded and bigoted.
What of our dead leaders? Marx, Engels and Lenin have all been transformed from active revolutionary politicians into mere interpreters of the world by reformists and left-leaning academics. They have also been deemed responsible for the gulags and the system of terror instituted by Stalin in the 1930s by rightist academics and their closely associated anarchist co-thinkers. Of course, such a calumny is sustainable because not only was Stalin’s ‘second revolution’- ie, the 1928 bureaucratic counterrevolution - carried out under the guise of Marxism, but so too were the Chinese, Korean, Albanian, Kampuchean and other bloody and disastrous experiments in national socialism. ‘Official communism’ in power created and lived an anti-Marxist Marxism. From the materialist theory of universal human liberation Marxism became a creaking idealist doctrine of (non-capitalist) statist oppression and exploitation. In the absurd propaganda claims, ideological trappings and actions of Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung and Hoxha and their descendants the permanent persuaders of capitalism found their truth.
Suffice to say, turning the likes of Marx, Engels and Lenin into their opposites - ie, advocates or heralds of national socialism - requires intellectual dishonesty on a grand scale. Capitalism ensures conformity to its interests in general through assimilation - fat salaries, research grants and all manner of petty honours and privileges. Bureaucratic socialism in contrast had to resort to blanket censorship, the destruction of all genuine political debate and the cult of an all-knowing leader. Lying about such giants as Marx, Engels and Lenin is endlessly difficult, however. Deceased they maybe. But their thoughts live on in our reading of their innumerable published writings (crude doctoring is easily exposed and was therefore in the main never attempted or quickly abandoned).
Communists must, and will, defend our own. We must also, being part of a class uniquely interested in the truth, seek to turn the personalities of official history back onto their feet - not least those who in some way articulated the age-old popular striving for freedom. In the tinselled and mystical, drunk and pious, commercial and joyous run-up to Christmas that especially applies to Jesus, who was - or so the Latin story goes - born 1,998 years ago on December 25 in the little town of Bethlehem (the orthodox tradition deploys a different date).
Interestingly some ‘honest’ Christians refuse to recognise or celebrate Christmas. Under the Commonwealth, a god-fearing Cromwell, suppressed it as devil-born heathenism, along with saints’ days. According to noted historian Christopher Hill, he “held the mass to be idolatrous, and both popery and prelacy in his view were repressive systems which might prevent Christian verity from expressing itself” (C Hill God’s Englishman Harmondsworth 1975, p205). Cromwell was here merely following the teachings of Luther and Calvin and pressing home the ongoing attack against the habits and mores of the old self-contained mediaeval society. Traditionally “religious festivals measured out the seasons of the year” and gave the masses an opportunity to dance wildly, drink to excess, have extra-marital sex and generally enjoy themselves (C Hill Society and puritanism London 1969, p202). Commercial society could not afford the 100- plus feast days nor countenance such disreputable goings-on.
Nowadays in Scotland the Free Presbyterians - the ‘wee-frees’ - also consider Christmas pagan. They are quite right. Most saints’ days were thinly veiled pre-Christian carry-overs. Christmas itself originated as an orgiastic communistic celebration of the winter solstice (eg, the Roman Saturnalia). It was only in the early 4th century that the western church decided to take December 25 as the “date for the nativity” (H Chadwick The early church Harmondsworth 1975, p126). The church could rename the day. But it could never totally eliminate its pre-Christian form and content - holly, mistletoe, the yule log, giving presents, getting together and getting high.
Of course, Christians who condemn Christmas are far from scientific or even open to level-headed argument. Each and every word of the bible is literally true, they claim, and comes from the lips of an all-knowing, all-powerful god. Actually both the New and the Old Testament contain little more historical truth than Homer’s epic account of the Trojan war in the Iliad. That, of course, does not imply that they are worthless. On the contrary. We gain an invaluable insight into the social conditions and mental world of aristocrats in pre-classic Greece from Homer. “I would rather have the Iliad than a whole shelf of Bronze-Age war-reports, however accurate” says translator EV Rieu (Homer The Iliad Bungay, Sussex 1950, pxiv).
Marxists should approach the testaments of the bible, the acts of the apostles and the epistles in a similar fashion. Each book is a palimpsest. Each one of them has been subject to wave after wave of systematic alteration. What became inconvenient found itself discarded or reworked. There were also sneaky additions of supposedly prophesied historical events in order to lend gravitas and plausibility for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless every deletion or embellishment leaves its significant social or ideological thumb-print or trace evidence, even if it is in the form of absence. Thus from these heavily redacted writings, if approached critically, it is possible to discover both the society and the contending ideas that produced Jesus and which saw the Jesus party transform itself over the span of three centuries from an organised expression of a communistic ideology of the oppressed into the state religion of imperial Rome.
1. Roman society in crisis
To grasp why the Roman world - crucially its emperors - took up the Christian cult, it is necessary to understand the dynamics and contradictions of its dominant mode of production and the needs, drives and ideologies of its different classes of people. In the last analysis economic life determines intellectual development. So let us begin with economics.
Rome and the huge Roman empire are commonly thought of as fabulously rich. The caesars and the ruling elite undoubtedly lived in and surrounded themselves with absolute luxury. Despite that in terms of productivity the Roman empire was “underdeveloped” (P Garnsey, R Saller The Roman empire Berkeley 1987, p43). Wealth resulted not from intensive, but extensive agricultural exploitation. In other words the ruling elite constantly sought to expand the extent of their landed domains and the numbers exploited. They did not invest in technology or industry.
Most inhabitants of the empire were peasants and practised an agriculture which generally “aimed at subsistence rather than the production of an exportable surplus” (ibid p44). There was a rich class of merchants. However, the ruling class of aristocrats built their wealth and social standing on land (successful merchants, invariably foreigners, transformed themselves into Roman aristocrats through marriage or other methods of social climbing and integration). Here in landed wealth mass slave (not just unfree) labour was crucial, or as GEM St Croix says “archetypal”; and that explains why it is correct to characterise Rome as a slave mode of production (GEM St Croix The class struggle in the ancient Greek world London 1983, p173). The ruling class was reproduced economically and culturally as a class through the forced (ie, non-economic) extraction of surplus product from slave labour and this fact moulded the class, ideological and power contours of the whole of society.
Such a system of slave labour must be distinguished from earlier, more benign forms of slavery. From the dawn of civilisation war-captives had been put to work instead of being summarily butchered. They existed outside the polis - having no blood relation to the community through tribe or gen. Nevertheless they were incorporated into the family, albeit in a subordinate position. These slaves worked alongside their masters and mistresses on the land or in the household. Kautsky reckons that their lot was “not very bad”(K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p51). Production was for immediate consumption. Exploitation therefore had definite limits. We can cite the affectionate relationship between Odysseus and the “divine swineherd”, Eumaeus. The slave is firmly convinced that his master “loved” and “took thought for me beyond all others”, and if he had returned from the Trojan war would immediately give him a handsome wife, a small farm and liberty (Homer The Odyssey Harmondsworth 1946, p225).
During classic civilisation there was no personal relationship between a master and the average agricultural slave. Slaves were far too numerous. Aristocratic slaveowners acquired a haughty contempt for manual labour. They did not work alongside their slaves. Nor did the likes of these exhibit the slightest human feelings for them. Slaves were mere speaking tools or instruments. In agriculture (and mining) conditions were miserable. Labour was unremitting. They were housed in single-sex barracks. Life expectancy was pitifully short. Lewis Grassic Gibbon in his novel Spartacus brilliantly portrays the hatred and fear that existed between the main classes in Roman society. Slaves would exact the most terrible revenge on their tormentors once they got the chance. Masters in their turn exterminated and subjected to extreme torture rebel slaves (100,000 slaves are said to have been killed during the Spartacus uprising of 73-71 BC).
However slaves were “extraordinarily” cheap (GEM St Croix The class struggle in the ancient Greek world London 1983, p227). One could purchase an average slave for not much more than half the annual earnings of an artisan. Appianus is quoted as saying that on one occasion slaves were being sold off for almost give-away prices - ie, 75 cents - so abundant was the supply (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p54). In contrast slaves in the Old South of the USA were many times more costly in comparative terms. Cheap slaves were the result of war and constant expansion. When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul there was mass enslavement; as many as half a million men, women and children were sold off to the highest bidder. Needless to say, as Rome expanded territorially, the surplus product available to the aristocratic landowners increased in direct proportion.
A fundamental contradiction can be located here. Roman military prowess originally wrested on the foundation of well drilled and well motivated legions of peasant infantrymen. This citizen militia enabled Rome to resist and then overpower culturally more advanced rivals. First the Latins and Etruscans, then the Macedonians, Greeks and Carthaginians, and finally the great cities and lands of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Rome was thus a world empire.
As the surplus available to the elite grew, so did their latifundia. An aristocratic general could well afford to be absent for lengthy periods of time. His overseers ensured the cycle of production continued as normal. Besides that, victories brought vast rewards, not least in the form of slaves and other booty. It was a different story for peasant citizens. Long service in distant lands often meant ruination. Land remained unploughed. Crops went unweeded or unharvested. Short-term relief was sought in loans. The result then of constant war for the peasant was not prosperity, but chronic indebtedness.
On the one hand the land hunger of the aristocrats and on the other the intolerable burden of debt saw free peasants steadily removed from the land and squeezed into the cities, in particular Rome. They formed a proletariat or lumpenproletariat that leeched off the surplus generated by slave labour. Cities in the ancient world were primarily units of consumption, not production. Industry was an individualised activity, and commodity production marginal or at least secondary. At its zenith the population of the capital reached one million (a conurbation not surpassed till the rise of 16th century commercial London). Most adults found a living through innumerable non-productive activities - from begging and prostitution to street huckstering and clientage.
Cheap slave labour therefore replaced free labour on the land. Put another way, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the mass employment of slave labour saw the rapid decline of free peasants as a class. Two main consequences follow.
The first was military. The combativity of Roman armies decreased markedly. Lumpenproletarians or proletarians who live by begging or light manual labour are not natural fighting material. When used they were inferior and unwilling substitutes. Peasant citizens were well fed, physically fit and tough; being habitually used to hard work and the extremes of heat and cold. The Roman state turned to mercenaries - including German barbarians. Such hired forces are notoriously conservative. They served to defend, but not expand the empire.
The second effect was economic. The end of territorial expansion and Pax Romana closed the abundant supply of war-captives. Slave prices rose sharply. They had to be bred or purchased from outsiders. The rate of surplus extraction had to fall. Slave labour is anyway much less productive than free peasant labour. When slaves were dirt cheap that mattered not. When they were expensive it meant a constant negative pressure on the mass of surplus available to the ruling class and thus a drive “to increase the rate of exploitation of the humbler free population” (GEM St Croix The class struggle in the ancient Greek world London 1983, p231).
Slave society proved a dead end. Economic productivity declined. Soil fertility declined. The population failed to reproduce itself and therefore declined. Cities and town became depopulated. Even Rome saw a decrease; in the Severi age (AD 193-235) a rapid one. Barbarian Germans were handed large parcels of land and slaves and former slaves enserfed as coloni. So exploited was this unfree, but productive, peasant class that large numbers fled over the empire’s borders. At the same time the burden of militarism grew. The empire was subject to constant raiding by barbarian neighbours. The standing army which was 300,000 at the time of Augustus had to be doubled. We therefore paradoxically find a swelling military budget while total revenue shrank. Taxes had to become more socially widespread, onerous and numerous (Roman citizens had been exempt from taxes). State power and society thereby become opposed - not only to the exploited, but the exploiters too.
Economic decay found its reflection in moral decay. Besides enslaving barbarians the Romans captured people with a significantly higher cultural attainment than themselves - most notably Greeks (who, it should be noted, inhabited urban centres across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean). To them the Romans handed tasks of everyday administration. They were also incorporated into the imperial household by the emperor. In the imperial period therefore we find slaves and freed slaves constituting the state bureaucracy under the person of the emperor. They amassed huge fortunes and counted amongst the richest of the rich.
The sheer geographical size of the empire drove it towards autocracy. The means of communication were too primitive to allow democracy amongst the old aristocratic rulers as they spread out to live in far-flung provinces. Rome itself had never been a citizen-democracy on the pattern of Athens. The people did not control the state. They had however won through class struggle the right to elect aristocrats to state positions. Around every aristocratic family there swarmed an army of hangers-on, dependants and loyal voting fodder. This corruption was reproduced on a much higher level with the birth of the emperor constitution.
The mass of Roman citizens lived off the crumbs of the system of slave exploitation. The lumpenproletariat and semi-employed proletariat played no productive role in society. Nor had they a vision of a higher, more productive, society. Cynicism was a characteristic lower class outlook - propagated in market squares by itinerant orators. Their radical religio-political programme was one of division of existing wealth. The lumpenproletriat had no wish to abolish slavery. It dreamt of a life without labour, a communism secured at the expense of the rich.
The more the lumpenproletariat predominated in the population, the more prone was the city to bribery by ambitious generals and senators. There were cash handouts, free food, huge banquets and numerous gladiatorial and other games for their benefit and amusement. The lumpenproletariat “lived”, says Kautsky, “by selling their political power to the highest bidder” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p108). The citizens of Rome - numbering two or three hundred thousand - thus indirectly exploited through ‘democracy’ an empire consisting of some 55 or 60 million people. Julius Caesar in particular, because of his military successes in and plunder of Gaul and Egypt, was able to offer generous gifts to these citizen masses - who became his tool against aristocratic rivals. The ground was laid for caesarist state autonomy and the end of the Roman republic.
Roman society tends not only to parasitism, but atomisation. As the entire empire falls into the hands of one individual, the population becomes open to demagogues and charlatans. The more someone feels impotent, the more they hope for a miracle or something fantastic to save them. Certain people are commonly believed to possess superhuman powers. Emperors claimed to be divine. Preachers routinely overturned the laws of nature; the dead are raised and demons exorcised. There was, notes Kautsky, a tremendous growth of “credulity” (ibid p128). Other writers offer a social-physiological explanation for both credulity and exorcism - in subject or colonial people cases of mental illness are particularly numerous (JD Crossan The historical Jesus Edinburgh 1991, p317).
With caesarism the patrician class too loses its social functions. Political life thereby dies and individualism grows. The aristocracy is reduced to mere pleasure-seekers. Inward looking Epicurean and Stoic philosophies come to dominance amongst them. The empty life of the aristocracy is neither concerned with labour nor even meaningful debate or decision-making. Such circumstances generate indifference along with feelings of disgust, guilt and despair. Traditional social bonds and modes of thought become moribund. Old local gods lose legitimacy. Romans become like everyone else in the empire - highly taxed subjects. Parochialism is replaced by internationalism. Hostility develops towards the state and salvation is sought in eastern and universal and often monotheistic religions. Underground cults and intolerance flourish.
These were the conditions that shaped Christianity and on which it grew.
2. The Jews
Jesus was a Jew. To know the real man one must know the Jewish people and the Jewish religion.
It was only after the Babylonian exile in the 5th century BC, that the Jewish religion took anything like the form we would recognise today. Before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, the Jews were no different from the numerous Semitic tribes that inhabited the Middle East. According to Emmanuel Anati, the earliest information we have of the Hebrew tribes fits into the “general framework of the massive migrations of people” some time at the end of the 19th century BC (E Anati Palestine before the Hebrews London 1963, p380). The Hebrew tribes were at one point in time closely associated with the Moabites and Ammonites - in biblical myth led by Lot - but separated from them as they moved to ‘sojourn’ in western Palestine.
The book of Genesis in the Old Testament provides us with a glimpse of their tribal customs and tribal structures - birth, marriage, burial, etc. They had family or clan gods and in all likelihood nature deities: “Our fathers worshipped idols on the other side of the river.” The confederacy of 11 Hebrew tribes were in their beginnings nomadic. To cement their alliance they would have invented or bound together legends and ancestors “into a single theological construction” (M Grant The ancient history of Israel London 1986, p30). For a living they relied on their sheep and goats. In common with other such herdsmen they engaged in irregular trade with neighbours. They also engaged with what was closely associated at the time, armed raiding. Nomadic herdsmen must always be prepared for war and never lack the opportunity; robbery thus became “a permanent institution, a regularly employed method of obtaining a livelihood” (K Kautsky The materialist conception of history New Haven 1988, p280).
Biblical tales of their wanderings owe much to later propagandists and embellishers. No doubt they camped in the shadow of Mount Sinai - the tribes would appear to have first come together “in the deserts of Sinai and Transjordan” (I Halevi A history of the Jews London 1987, p34). Perhaps they clashed with the Egyptians - though only the priest-caste of Levis, the so-called 12th tribe, show any sign of Egyptianisation. Moses is considered by some authorities Egyptian in background. However, it was only after they invaded and settled in Palestine (Canaan) that the Hebrew community entered history and took definite form as a settled agricultural and mercantile nation.
Amongst primitive peoples the notion of divinity is altogether amorphous; Engels argues that in general religion at this stage reflected humanity’s domination by the alien “forces of nature” (F Engels MECW Vol 25, Moscow 1987, p301). Mountains, rivers, groves of trees may be considered the home of particularly powerful spirits (among the Hebrews many were called El - the bible contains many references). There were particularly important shrines at Shadai, Bethel, Elyon and El Roi.
Nomads often carried their gods with them in the form of sacred objects - peculiarly shaped stones or pieces of wood. Worship would take place in a special tent (tabernacle). The bible story of the Ark of the Covenant - a box in which god purportedly dwells - is an echo of their nomadic times before the Hebrew tribes settled in Palestine. Fetishistic objects or teraphim brought divine protection, rain and military victories. So the gods of the Hebrews seem at first to have been nothing more than fetishes, similar to the ones Jacob’s wife, Rachel, stole as they fled from her father, Laban (Genesis xxxi, 19).
Like the Zoroastrian Persians and later the Islamic Arabs, the monotheism of the Hebrews was the result not of philosophical sophistication, but sudden contact with and adoption of a “higher urban culture” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p202). From 724 BC onwards the Hebrew people went from being conquerors to being conquered. First the Assyrians and then the Babylonians invaded. But instead of plundering, taxing and garrisoning the vanquished land and then suffering the inevitable uprising when an opportune moment arose, both the Assyrians and Babylonians tried to make their gains secure by deporting the social elite - the great landowners, priests and the most wealthy. Under the Assyrians the northern Hebrew tribes in Samaria disappear from history. Later many of the common people were to become Christian and later again Muslim. The Palestinian Arabs of today are surely the descendants of these ancient Hebrews.
However, the fate of Judaea in the south was somewhat different. The Babylonians “carried away” into captivity the king, his mother, his wives and all the “mighty of the land” (II Kings xxiv, 12-16). Jeremiah also tells how the Babylonians only “left the poor of the people, which had nothing in the land of Judah”, to whom they redistributed the land (so as to exact tribute). Those - mainly illiterate peasants, the ‘people of the land’ - who remained lacked internal intellectual dynamic towards a higher culture. They married Canaanites and other ‘outsiders’ and continued to worship and sacrifice at a local shrine (‘bethel’ or house of god).
Judaism developed in exile. The elite was awestruck by Babylon, its magnificent buildings, and its sophisticated ideas - which in religion had long ago abandoned geo-specific deities and was in all likelihood moving towards some kind of monotheism. The Hebrew priests were soon aping and adapting from the Babylonians. Many Jewish notions of worship and biblical myths owe their origins to the 50 years of exile - the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the flood, etc. If they had stayed in Babylon longer the Judaeans would undoubtedly have become fully assimilated. However, the Babylonian empire collapsed before Persian invasion - Babylon was taken without resistance. The Persian king Cyrus decided to permit the Judaeans (the Jews) to return to their homeland. The elite were to serve as his vassals. Jerusalem and its temple was rebuilt as the religious-administrative centre of a subordinate social order. From Jerusalem the elite oversaw the extraction of tribute from the local population and the management of the Jewish diaspora (successful Jewish traders were established in colonies from one end of the Persian empire to another).
When the priesthood came back from exile in 538 BC, they carried with them a higher more abstract sense of the divine - monotheism. Being artificial, the new religion had to rely on “deception and falsification” (F Engels MECW Vol 24, Moscow 1989, p427). The old sacred texts were “rewritten, codified, expurgated, annotated and completed” (I Halevi A history of the Jews London 1987, p29). Here the scribes and priests under Ezra and his successors had a great advantage. They had dropped the ancient Hebrew alphabet - still used by the Samaritans of Nablus in their liturgy - in favour of the square alphabet of the Aramaeans, in which Hebrew is written today. The possibilities for distortion and outright doctoring opened up by the transliteration from one alphabet to another were immense (the mass of the population, it should not be forgotten, were illiterate). Judaism was invented. Only a few shards of the previous tradition survive.
To establish ideological hegemony and acceptance of the Jewish elite, the old tribal polytheism was ruthlessly purged. Apart from the temple at Jerusalem all other centres of worship along with their fetishes were forcibly put down as pagan abominations. The bible does not deny the existence nor the power of other gods. It demands loyalty to one god: “I am the Lord; that is my name; and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images” (Isaiah xiii, 8). The Jewish god therefore did not arise from philosophy, from the emergence of one god alone and unrivalled, but the triumph of the god of Jerusalem, who was equated with the god of Moses, over rivals. Consequently Jehovah was both universal and parochial Jehovah, or more correctly Yahweh, was the god of all humanity (creation) and yet was also claimed as the ancestral and national god of the Jews. “The first shall be Zion” (Isaiah xli, 25). He “will set you high above all nations that he has made, in praise and in fame and in honour, and that you shall be a people holy to the lord your god” (Deuteronomy ixx, 26).
As will be readily appreciated, that does not mean the rewritten Old Testament was simply crude falsehood. It reflected, in no matter how distorted a manner, the class antagonism between the returning elite and the masses: ie, the domination of social forces or history over humanity. Marx succinctly explained in his fourth thesis on Feuerbach, that the “secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm”, because of “the inner-self and intrinsic-contradictions” of the secular base (K Marx MECW Vol 5, Moscow 1976, p7). Religion is a social and class product.
As Persian vassals, the elite had no army - only a religious police. They had to rely on remaking and then maintaining the Jews as a sect-people. Fear of god had to impose obedience. The evolution of Jehovah was therefore bound up with military weakness and class struggle. Those peasants who had married ‘foreign women’ were initially excluded from the ‘assembly of Israel’. Priests formed themselves into an hereditary theocracy which extracted tribute (surplus product) through the system of compulsory pilgrimage, sacrifice and offering - the dominant social relationship. Temple taxes brought enormous wealth to Jerusalem and “kept large numbers profitably employed” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p271).
Hence in the god Jehovah we can gain an insight into the Jewish people and the evolution of their real life processes. The same applies to Christianity and Jesus; only with the proviso that besides the New Testament (written in its present form between 80 and 150 AD), we have relatively abundant literary records, not least those of the Romans.
3. Jesus - a man of his times
Jesus, in the New Testament, is credited with supernatural powers. Even the most ‘progressive’ Church of England bishop pretends or believes that he worked wonders and roused the minds of millions. Suffice to say, even before the end of the 18th century, Edward Gibbon pointed out in his Decline and fall, with what Kautsky called “delicate irony”, that though the “laws of nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church”, the sages of Greece and Rome “appeared unconscious of any alteration in the moral or physical government of the world” (quoted in K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p23). At the time no contemporary pagan or Jewish observer devoted even one word to Jesus.
The first non-Christian to mention him - “the king who was never king” - was said to have been Josephus Flavius, in the so-called ‘Slavonic version’ of the Jewish war and the 18 and 19th books of the Jewish antiquities (B Radice [ed] Josephus The Jewish war Harmondsworth 1981, p470). Though the words of this pro-Roman aristocratic Jew and contemporary of Jesus were much valued by Christians, all serious scholars nowadays admit that they were a 3rd century interpolation.
One of two conclusions broadly present themselves. Either Jesus did not exist - John Allegro, fantastically in my opinion, says the whole Jesus story was a “fictional” cover for a secret drug-using cult (see JM Allegro The sacred mushroom and the cross London 1970). Or, as is the case, there were so many magic-making saviours or messiahs (ie, christs in the Greek tongue), that while others were given passing reference he did not rate a mention. Josephus rails against the countless “religious frauds and bandit chiefs” who joined forces in an attempt to win freedom from Rome. He also writes sneeringly of an “Egyptian false prophet” who, posing as a seer, “collected about 30,000 dupes” and after leading them around the desert took them to the Mount of Olives; “and from there was ready to force entry into Jerusalem” so as to seize “supreme power”. Roman heavy infantry scattered the “mob” and killed or captured “most of his followers” (B Radice [ed] Josephus The Jewish war Harmondsworth 1981, p147).
Palestine was at the crossroads of Middle Eastern civilisations. That is what made it a land of milk and honey for the Hebrews and a strategic target for the superpowers of the ancient world. As we have said, from the 8th century BC one invasion followed another. Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonian Greeks and finally, in the 1st century BC, the Romans. During power vacuums there were brief interludes of independence as for example under the Maccabees. But, all in all, the Jews became an oppressed nationality, which in turn bred “national fanaticism to the highest degree” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p227). With the Romans there was a widespread feeling, particularly amongst the poor, that the last times had arrived. Jewish eschatology (the lore of the last times) taught that a new communistic world was ready to be born along with class retribution against the oppressors and their agents. Family and everyday relations were lived under the palpable idea of this impending apocalypse.
National feelings and class interests were mediated through the prism of religious faction. The rallying slogan of the “downtrodden and disaffected” was loyalty to god and his law (H Schonfield The pentecost revolution London 1985, p31). Those below ranged themselves not only against Rome, but those quislings who were prepared to cooperate with them: namely, the royal Herodians - who were virtually alone in being pro-Roman - and the Sadducees, the conservative priest-caste and big landowners. That is not to say the masses were united behind a single party.
Three main, though highly fragmented and overlapping, opposition strands existed. Firstly, the Pharisees (rabbis or lay religious teachers). In general they were cautious middling types who defended and developed a living Judaism against upper class sacrilege and dry-as-dust dogmatism. Secondly, apocalyptic revolutionaries like the Zadokites or Essenes of Dead Sea scroll fame. These priestly devouts lived in communistic communities. All property was held in common. They fasted, prayed for and expected god’s divine intervention against the Romans and a messiah. On the day of deliverance and judgement the elect rise from their graves and Rome is cast down in a mighty conflagration. Then, following god’s ordinance, the messiah, born of David’s royal line, would rule a new - communistic - world order from the holy city of Jerusalem. Thirdly, the Zealots, or the militant wing of the Pharisees. Here were practical revolutionaries and skilled guerrilla fighters. These republicans believed that god helps those who help themselves. Albeit sketchy, that is the Jewish religio-political spectrum.
Pharisee preachers and messianic prophets turned biblical texts against the Herodian aristocracy and the Sadducee priest-caste. Their Hellenised ways and subservience to the ‘beast’ - ie, Rome - were denounced as an abomination against god and religious law. Because of their sinful ways Jehovah no longer brought Israel victory, but punishment in the form of poverty and humiliation. Roman emperors, governors and procurators were arrogant, rapacious and brutal. They were determined to extract the maximum surplus from conquered territories. Taxation and other forms of tribute left the masses on the verge of starvation. Tax collectors - ‘publicans’ - used torture and sold whole families into slavery. To cap it all the Romans were not averse to parading images of their god-emperor in Jerusalem - sacrilege for any Jew. They even proposed in 39-40 AD to erect a statue of Gaius Caligula in their temple. No wonder the Jewish populus detested the Romans, much like the Poles detested the Nazis.
For over 100 years Palestine was a hotbed of revolt within the Roman empire - the Zealot uprisings of 6 AD and 66-73 AD and the Bar-Kokhba kingdom in the 2nd century being outstanding examples. However, if Palestine was the Roman’s Ireland, Galilee in the far north, where Jesus grew from childhood, was its Derry.
Set against the nationalist-religious background we have just outlined, the New Testament Jesus is therefore a very strange person, to say the least. Nowhere does he challenge or even question Roman occupation of Judaea and indirect rule of Galilee (at the time of Jesus it had a pro-Roman Jewish satrap - Herod Antipas). Instead he appears to positively love the Roman tyrant. It is the Pharisees who earn his ire and rebuke. Jesus even urges fellow Jews to dutifully pay Roman taxes. “Render unto Caesar ...” Frankly that would have been akin to preaching to the people of Glasgow the desirability of paying the hated poll tax under Thatcher. And yet incongruously he manages to gain an active mass following among the rural and urban poor.
His birth and infancy are even harder to swallow. A Roman census in what is now year zero - there was one in 6 AD - unbelievably requires subjects of the empire to travel to the places of their birth! If such a stipulation has been made, the movement of people would surely have caused complete chaos. In fact all the Romans required was registration at one’s normal place of residence (the census was for tax- raising purposes and was deeply resented by the population). Galileians incidentally would not have been affected. Anyway, or so the story goes, Joseph, the ‘father’ of Jesus, and his heavily pregnant, but virgin, wife, trek all the way from Nazareth in the far north to Bethlehem in Judaea. There, guided by a wondrous star, shepherds and wise men shower the child with praise and gifts, just before king Herod, the father of Herod Antipas, orders the massacre of the innocents. But only after Joseph and Mary, having been warned by an angel, flee towards Egypt. All pure invention, as was the ability of the young Jesus to outwit the temple priests in theology when he visits Jerusalem.
Here, as with much else, we have the heavy hand of propaganda and later Greek rewriters. In general it has to be said that the gospels - written between 40 and 120 years after Jesus’ death - display profound ignorance of the elementary facts of Jewish life. Moreover they become progressively anti-Jewish. In John, the last of the four main gospels, Jesus is a pro-Roman, Mithras-like man-god who was put to death solely due to the collective guilt of the Jewish people. In this tradition he knowingly sacrifices himself in sado-masochistic fashion in order to atone for the sins of humanity.
Yet by drawing on what we know of the Jews at the time and removing obvious invention, we can arrive at a much more probable version of events. Charismatic and well educated, Jesus was certainly a Pharisee (teacher and preacher). Gospel passages which show enmity to Pharisees, such as over Sabbath-healing, have “clearly been inserted where the original story had ‘Sadducees’” (H Maccoby Revolution in Judaea London 1973, p139). He came to believe, during the course of his ministry, that he was not only a prophet but the messiah (or anointed one) who would deliver the Jewish people from Rome (and end the days of the robber empires). He therefore spoke of himself as the ‘Son of David’ or ‘Son of God’ (by which he certainly did not mean he was a man-god - a blasphemous concept for Jews). That is why two of the gospels - Matthew and Luke - are interesting in that they leave in the great lengths earlier source accounts had gone to in order to prove that through Joseph he was biologically directly related to David: ie, the last great king of Israel 600 years before him. The prophet Micah had predicted that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem like David. Jesus, or his early propagandists, were proclaiming him to be royal and the lawful king of Israel. It was like someone announcing themselves to be the Saxon king of England against Plantaginet or Angevin upstarts - in the time of Jesus such a statement had explicitly revolutionary connotations.
Jesus’ claim to be ‘king of the Jews’ was political. He was proclaiming himself to be the leader of a popular revolution that would bring forth a communistic ‘kingdom of god’. This was no pie in the sky when you die. The slogan ‘kingdom of god’ was of this world and was widely used by Zealot and other anti-Roman forces. It conjured up for Jews an idealised vision of the old theocratic system - which could only be realised by defeating the Romans. But in the new days it will be the poor who benefit and the rich who suffer ... “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of god! Woe unto ye that are rich! Woe unto ye that are full for ye shall hunger. Woe unto ye that laugh for ye shall mourn and weep!” (Luke). This immanent class retribution was not to be confined to Israel alone. The Jews were god’s revolutionary vanguard. Through them Jesus’ plan was for a universal utopia. From Jerusalem a new “world theocracy”, with Jesus at its head, would redeem “all nations” (H Schonfield The passover plot London 1977, p24). Then onwards peace reigns; swords would be beaten into ploughshares and the wolf lies down with the lamb.
Jesus was no Zealot. Militantly republican - ‘god is our only ruler and lord’ - they were committed to a realistic long-term guerrilla war against the Romans. Formally the odds were hopeless. However, their ‘zeal’ would triumph, as had Judas Maccabaeus, Samson, Gideon and Joshua before them. God would lend aid, but they did not expect miracles. The Zealots led many of the poorer Jewish population in the 66-73 AD revolt which ended in the heroic last stand at Massada. Rather than surrender to the Romans the Zealot fighters under Eleazar ben Jair preferred suicide.
Jesus was an apocalyptic revolutionary similar to John the Baptist. He “believed in the miraculous character of the coming salvation, as described in the writings of the scriptural prophets” (H Maccoby Revolution in Judaea London 1973, pp157-8). Jesus was not interested in military strategy or tactics. Rome would be beaten without conventional war. Nevertheless, though Jesus did not train his followers in the use of arms, five of his 12 disciples came from the ranks of the Zealots and retained guerrilla nicknames (including Peter ‘Barjonah’ - ‘outlaw’; Simon - the Zealot; James and John - the ‘sons of thunder’; and Judas Iscariot - the ‘dagger-man’).
This is not surprising. Jesus was no pacifist: “I come not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew x, 34). Liberation would have a military aspect; nevertheless primarily it depended on supernatural intervention. There would be a decisive battle where a tiny army of the righteous overcome overwhelmingly superior forces. In the bible Gideon fought and won with only 300 men. So the methods of Jesus and the Zealots differed, but were not entirely incompatible. The Zealots were unlikely to have opposed Jesus. His mass movement would at the very least have been seen by them as an opportunity.
Jesus was therefore not isolated from Jewish life and the political turmoil around him. The notion that he eschewed violence is a later Christian invention designed to placate Roman hostility and overcome their fears that the followers of the dead man-god were dangerous subversives. Nor would Jesus ever have said, “Resist not evil.” The idea is a monstrosity, fit only for despairing appeasers. Jewish scripture is replete with countless examples of prophets fighting what they saw as evil - not least foreign oppressors. The real Jesus preached the ‘good news’ within the Jewish tradition against evil (and in all probability against personal vendettas and tit-for-tat revenge). He was determined to save every ‘lost sheep of Israel’, including social outcasts and reprobates such as the hated tax collectors, for the coming apocalypse. Salvation depended on repentance.
After the execution of John the Baptist, Jesus reveals himself to be not simply a prophetic ‘preparer of the way’, but the messiah. “Whom say ye that I am?” Jesus asks his disciples. “Thou art the christ,” answers Peter. This was an extraordinary claim, but one fully within the Jewish thought-world. He was not and would not have been thought of as mad. Before, there had been prophets and even prophet-rulers (Moses and Samuel), but never a messiah-king: ie, the final king. In Jesus the spiritual and secular would be joined. The bold idea must have “aroused tremendous enthusiasm in his followers, and great hope in the country generally” (H Maccoby Revolution in Judaea 1973, p163). Perhaps this explains why after he was cruelly killed on a Roman cross the Jesus party refused to believe he had really died. His claimed status put him in terms of myth at least on a par with Elijah; he would return at the appointed hour to lead them to victory.
New Testament (re)writers are at pains to play down or deny Jesus’ assumed royal title. It was to openly rebel against Rome. Instead they concentrate on terms like ‘messiah’ or ‘christ’, which they portray as being other-worldly. The Jews, and the disciples, are shown as not understanding this concept, though it arose from their own sacred writings and collective consciousness. Nevertheless even in the gospels the truth occasionally juts through. Pilate has Jesus crowned with thorns and has ‘King of the Jews’ inscribed on his cross. So if we use imagination and common sense it is possible to discover the probable pattern of Jesus’ brief revolutionary career.
4. Jesus as revolutionary
The account of the so-called transfiguration on Mount Hermon described in Mark was no mystical event, but the crowning (or anointing) of King Jesus by his closest disciples, Peter, James and John. One seems to have crowned him while the other two acted as the prophets Moses and Elijah (Mark ix, 4). Like Saul, David and Solomon the new king was through the ceremony “turned into another man” (I Samuel x, 6).
Having been crowned, the prophet-king began a royal progress towards his capital, Jerusalem. He has 12 close disciples accompanying him - representing the so-called 12 tribes of Israel, and sends out 70 more into “every city and place” - the Jewish law-making council, the Sanhedrin had 70 members. From Mount Hermon the royal procession makes its way through Galilee, then to the east bank of the Jordan and Peraea before reaching Jericho. King Jesus has a big following and is greeted by enthusiastic crowds. He preaches the coming kingdom of god and with it “eternal life” (Mark x, 30). The poor are to inherit the world and unless the rich sell what they have and give to the poor they will be damned. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god” (Mark x, 25). Jesus performs many miracles. The blind are given sight, cripples walk, etc (cities and towns were teeming with beggars: no doubt that included the professionally crippled and blind).
Finally he triumphantly enters Jerusalem - either during the spring Passover or more likely in the autumn festival of the Tabernacles. Spectacle for such apocalyptic revolutionaries is crucial. He symbolically rides upon an ass’s foal (thus fulfilling the prophesy of Zechariah ix, 9). There is no doubt what the masses - many of them festival pilgrims - think. They greet Jesus with unrestrained joy and as ‘Son of David’ and ‘King of Israel’ - royal titles. Palm branches are strewn before him and, showing their defiance of Rome, they cry out, “hosanna” - ‘save us’.
With the help of the masses Jesus and his lightly armed band force their way to the temple. The religious police are easily dispersed. There he rededicated it, drove out the moneychangers and the venal Sadducee priesthood (the majority of priests carry on with their duties). They “have made it a den of robbers” (Mark xi, 17). The Romans and their agents would have viewed the events as a nuisance rather than anything else. Rebellions at festival times were not uncommon. Moreover in possession of the temple area he and his followers were protected by the “multitude” from the poor quarter of Jerusalem. The priesthood are said to have been “afraid of the people” (Mark xi, 32). They debated theology with Jesus but could do no more.
Jesus expected a miracle. There would be a tremendous battle. On the one side the Romans and their quislings. On the other his followers ahead of “12 legions of angels” (Matthew xxvi, 53). The defiled temple was to be destroyed and then rebuilt in “three days” (Matthew xxvi, 62). The dead would rise and god, with Jesus at his right hand, would judge all the nations. Jesus waited seven days for the apocalyptic arrival of god’s kingdom. It was meant to come on the eighth. At the last supper he expectantly says: “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until that day I drink it in the new kingdom of god.” Yet though he prayed his heart out in Gethsemane “the hour” did not come. A cohort of Roman soldiers (300-600 men), and officers of the Jewish high priest, did (perhaps guided to him by Judas, perhaps not - Kautsky says the idea that anyone in the Sadducee party not knowing what Jesus looked like is too fantastic).
Jesus was easily captured (a strange, naked youth narrowly escapes in Mark). It is an unequal contest. His disciples only had “two swords”. “It is enough,” Jesus had assured them (Luke xxii, 38). There was a brief skirmish according to the biblical account. Supposedly Jesus then says, “No more of this”, and rebukes the disciple who injured a “slave of the high priest”. Jesus miraculously heals him. Jesus is thus presented as being opposed to bloodshed: “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew xxvi, 52). Evidently this is an interpolation. We have already seen Jesus promising cataclysmic violence and arming his followers, albeit with only two swords (the angels though would have been ready for battle).
Interrogated by the high priest, Jesus was quickly handed over to Pilate as a political prisoner. Without fuss or bother Jesus was found guilty of sedition - he was calling for non-payment of Caesar’s taxes and had proclaimed himself king of the Jews. Jesus had no thought or intent of delivering himself up as a sacrificial lamb. He had expected an awesome miracle and glory, not total defeat. The gospels report his dejection and refusal to “answer, not even to a single charge” (Matthew xxvii, 14). Pilate might have been besieged by the Jerusalem mob. But they would have been crying for Jesus’ freedom, not “Away with him. Crucify him” (John xv, 19). There was certainly no custom in occupied Palestine whereby the population could gain the release of any “one” condemned prisoner “whom they wanted” (Matthew xxvii, 15). Pilate did not seek to “release him”, nor did the Jews demand his execution. The notion of Pilate’s “innocence” is as absurd as the blood guilt of the Jews. Obviously we have another pro-Roman insert.
After whipping, beating and spitting upon him, Pilate had Jesus thrown into prison. Then, perhaps after a number of months, had him sent to an agonising death (Pilate may well have waited till the spring Passover festival, so he could make Jesus an example before as many Jews as possible). Jesus was paraded through the streets guarded by a “whole battalion”. Pilate’s plan was to humiliate the King of the Jews and show his powerlessness. Jesus is stripped and a (royal) scarlet robe is draped over his shoulders. A “crown of thorns” is mockingly planted on his head and a “reed” placed in his right hand (Matthew xxvii, 28). He is crucified along with two other rebels and derided by the Romans and their allies. Over his head they on Pilate’s orders “put the charge against him”. “This is the King of the Jews” (Matthew xxvii, 37). John has the chief priests objecting. That has the ring of truth. They wanted Pilate to write, “This man said he was King of the Jews.” An arrogant Pilate has none of it. John puts these blunt words in his mouth: “What I have written I have written” (John ixx, 21, 22). The last words of Jesus are heart-rending:“Eli,eli,lamasabachthani?” (My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?). God had failed him.
Jesus was a brave - albeit an ultra-left - revolutionary who wrongly staked all not on the masses, but a coup and outside intervention.
There are supposedly miraculous happenings at his moment of death. Saints rise from their graves and walk about. There are earthquakes and the curtain in the temple is torn in two. Even more fanciful, the bible has it that it is the Roman centurion and guard who are first to declare that the man they have just killed is “truly son of god” (Matthew xxvii, 54). Actually for them it was just like any other day’s work. The execution of rebel ringleaders were a common occurrence for the Roman garrison.
5. Character of the primitive congregation
The Jesus party survived the death of its founder-leader. The party, commonly called the Nazarenes, continued under James - the brother of Jesus. Incidentally we know a deal more about him from contemporary historical evidence than Jesus himself. James was executed in 62 AD. Under his leadership the party grew rapidly. The Acts of the Apostles report a big increase from 120 cadre to several thousand in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus. The recruits were, of course, fellow Jews - including Pharisees, Essenes, Baptists and Zealots. People undoubtedly inspired by the attempted Jesus coup - and the subsequent story that his body had disappeared and had, like Elijah, risen to heaven (the Romans blamed his disciples: they had secretly removed the corpse from its tomb - a slightly more likely scenario). They all fervently believed that the end was nigh and expected the imminent deliverance and the return of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of god is at hand” (Mark i, 14-15).
The Nazarenes must be distinguished from the Jewish masses roused by Jesus. They were the elect and, as with the Essenes, strictly communistic. Membership was no soft option. Dues levels were apparently 100%. Everything was to be shared - including in all probability wives and husbands. “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and distributed them to all, as everyone had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and partaking of food from house to house, took their meals with gladness and singleness of mind, praising god, and having favour with all the people. And the lord added daily to the community those who should be saved” (Acts ii, 44-47). Needless to say, the bible claim that the Jerusalem population had just a short time previously demanded the execution of Jesus is again shown to be untenable: ie, a disgusting lie. There was the warmest sympathy for him before and after his death from broad sections of the masses. The Nazarenes had an eschatological outlook and “convictions with which they could really identify” (H Schonfield The pentecost revolution London 1985, p112). Moreover the fact that the Nazarenes were transparently sincere in their communism and shared all things undoubtedly increased their “favour with all the people”.
The Nazarenes were neither Christian nor Jewish-Christians. As indicated above, they continued to worship in the Jerusalem temple and observe all the standard Jewish laws and taboos. They were furthermore overwhelmingly lower class. This is testified to long after the early beginnings by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians: “Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were noble of birth; but god chose what is foolish in the world to shame the strong, god chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of god” (1 Corthinthians i, 26-30). The proletarian character of the Nazarenes is one of the reasons why we possess so little hard evidence of exact organisation and ideology. The leaders were surely persuasive and eloquent fellows. But their party culture was an oral, not a written one. Maybe the leaders could read and write. Yet the rank and file were in all probability illiterate. The teachings and sayings of Jesus were therefore, to begin with, handed down by word of mouth. There was considerable scope for exaggeration and downright invention. Nevertheless, again, it should be stressed, that the myth making of the Nazarenes was firmly within the traditions of the Jewish communistic sects.
They exhibited a strong, not to say fanatical, class hatred against the rich. We find such firmly established ideas scattered throughout the New Testament. Being seared onto the brains of even the most ignorant amongst the congregation, they could not easily be expunged by later writers and rewriters. In Luke we read that the rich man “who was clothed in purple and fine linen” goes to Hades (and “torment” and the “flames”) simply because he is rich. The poor man Lazarus in contrast finds comfort in “Abraham’s bosom” (Luke xvi, 19). The letter of James - written in the first half of the second century - is full of loathing of the rich, once more because they are rich. The poor have been “chosen by god” to be “heirs of the kingdom which he has promised”. The rich “oppress you”, “drag you to court” and “blaspheme”, thunders the apostle (James ii, 5-7). The poor are urged to patiently await the “coming of the lord” and class revenge. “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you” (James v, 1).
Nazarene doctrine found support not only among the Jews of Palestine, but the numerous Jews living in the Roman empire - in particular Rome, Syria and Alexandria. Through organisation, belief in Jesus as a risen messiah spread. However, the key to why Nazarene Judaism did not simply remain one of the Jewish sects was its internationalism. Zealots and Essenes had a vision of a Jewish domination of the world. The Nazarenes were equally hostile to Rome, but increasingly emphasised class hatred over national hatred. This gave them the ear of “god-fearing” non-Jews. They accepted the Jewish god, attended the synagogue, but often refused to observe the dietary laws. The men squirmed at the thought of circumcision. Jesus had explicitly forbidden proselytising amongst non-Jews: “Go not into the way of the gentiles” (Matthew x, 6). Saul of Tarsus was the first to directly orientate the Nazarene party towards god-fearing gentiles. He not only westernised his name to Paul, but sought to whittle away the specifically Jewish elements of the faith. At first his programme would have been no more than implicit, a tendency. Laws and taboos should be moderated, not discarded. However, as Paul won a mass base amongst the gentiles, it was natural that a cleavage should develop between the original explicitly Jewish wing of the party based in Jerusalem and his wing centred on Rome.
It was the Jewish uprising of AD 66-73 and its defeat with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple which definitively split the gentile congregation from its Jewish roots. The Jewish uprising in Palestine was initially remarkably successful. Every Jewish faction took up arms - and suffered a common fate. The sacking of Jerusalem, the mass slaughter of its population and the exiling of the Jews virtually extinguished the Jewish wing of the Nazarenes. Amongst the Jews the idea of the messiah disappears from history because it was based on the existence of the nation.
The Romans openly expressed concern that other Jewish communities in the empire - including the Nazarenes - would act as a fifth column. Those who look forward to a universal messiah have every interest therefore in distancing themselves from the Jewish national movement. They became Christian. Their leaders did everything they could to purge their doctrine of Jewish elements. The original gospels were suppressed and new versions written. We know of the first gospel of Thomas, the Ergeton gospel, the gospel of the Hebrews and the Cross gospel only from tiny fragments of papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus and passing references in obscure texts (see JD Crossan The historical Jesus Edinburgh 1991, appendix 1). Obviously there were severe limits. Nevertheless Christianity became hostile to Judaism, pro-Roman and in due course anti-Semitic.
6. Rome and Christianity
The Christian church thoroughly Romanised itself ideologically and culturally. Jewish national revolutionary ideas became their opposites. Kautsky eloquently points out that the kingdom of god ceased to be liberation from above and was instead “transferred to heaven”. Resurrection of the flesh was replaced with the promise of “immortality of the soul” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p409). The congregation’s communism lingered on in the form of common meals. In time that became purely symbolic - a wafer of bread and a sip of wine. The rich no longer had anything to fear. They joined and rose to prominence. Slaves and the servile orders were now told they had a moral duty to obey their masters. In the gospels the poor were safely transformed into the “poor in spirit”. Demands to sell everything gave way to charity-mongering and buying a place in heaven.
Those who willingly gave up everything - property, possessions, sex - and practised communism were considered holy and enjoyed high prestige. These “radical elements” naturally felt that they were superior. They formed a church aristocracy. “Like every other aristocracy”, writes Kautsky, it “did not content itself with claiming the right to command the rest of the community, but also attempted to exploit the community” (K Kautsky Foundations of Christianity New York 1972, p423). Radical communism thus becomes its bureaucratic opposite - bishops, deacons and abbots. The congregation loses all democratic power and declines into an inert mass. The property and organisation of the church effectively becomes the collective property of the clerical bureaucracy.
Christianity suffered savage persecution under various emperors. The church was seen as a rival. Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Decius and Valerian attempted to beat it. Diocletian eventually sought rapprochement and Constantine finally brought about unity between church and state. It was Constantine who oversaw the Council of Nicaea in 325 which formalised church doctrine and the absolute power of the bishops. The democratic congregation was a dangerous threat to the authority of the state. The bureaucratic church proved an invaluable adjunct to an imperial state which had long since lost the active support of the Roman citizens of Rome. Septimus Severus (AD 193-211) had formally abolished the ‘old-fashioned’ prerogatives of Rome and Italy. Eventually in 297 the empire was completely ‘updated’ and proclaimed an absolute monarchy. Diocletian’s ‘modernisation’ turned every citizen into a subject.
The church could not be conquered, but it could be incorporated as a privileged subaltern into the new emperor system. Either that or it might have developed theocratic ambitions (most fully realised by the Islamic states of Mohammed and the first four caliphs).
Christianity triumphed when it had fully become its opposite. The victory of Christianity was not the victory of the proletariat, but the victory of the exploiting church bureaucracy over the proletariat. Victory was obtained not by means of subversion. The church had become a conservative force, a tool in the hands of the emperor. It used its new-found standing not to eliminate slavery and exploitation, but to perpetuate slavery and exploitation by preaching submission.
7. Communism
In many respects the evolution of early Christianity parallels social democracy and ‘official communism’ in the 20th century. The labour movement has been turned against the working class. Social democracy fused with the bourgeois state. ‘Official communism’ created a bureaucratic anti-capitalist state that lived off the exploitation of the working class.
However, where the ancient proletariat was a class born of social decay, our modern working class continues to grow - both in terms of sheer numbers and also quality, because of the unequalled pulse of capitalism.
The educated and cultured working class of today has every interest in a higher, more democratic form of society. Indeed in the last analysis the universal abolition of exploitation of the many by the few is a matter of self-interest for a class with radical chains. Whatever setbacks, whatever defeats, whatever betrayals our class suffers, it will therefore again and again return to the fight.