My late father had a very wry
sense of humour. At Christmas, whenever there was a reference to church
services on the television, he would tut and shake his head. “Look at that”, he
would say, “They try to bring religion into everything!”
I imagine much the same complaint
may have been made by ancient Celts, annoyed that the Christian priests were
taking over their traditional Yule festival, celebrating the winter solstice.
Or perhaps by Roman citizens, peeved at the Christians taking over their annual
‘Saturnalia’ festival in the last weeks of December.
Those complaining would have been
right, because in the absence of an identifying date anywhere in the canonical
gospels, Christians grafted their celebration of the birth of Jesus onto the
existing pagan festivals. In one stroke they absorbed the pagan rites into the
Christian tradition and softened opposition to the new creed.
Many practising Christians today
are completely unaware of the pagan and sometimes arbitrary origins of
important elements of their religious beliefs and practices. Many seriously
believe the origin of Christianity lies in a ‘silent night’ in a barn visited
by quiet shepherds and several awe-struck ‘wise’ men. But nothing could be
further from the truth.
Materialism
For Marxists, who base themselves
on the real, material world, there was a completely different reality. Last year marked the centenary of the
publication of ‘The Foundations of Christianity’ by the German Marxist theoretician,
Karl Kautsky. This was the first attempt to describe the rise of that major
western religion from the standpoint of class forces and the material
developments of society, rather than by the pious fictions fed from church
pulpits.
Karl Kautsky’s book was deficient
in many respects, but the main lines of his argument still stand the test
today. What was especially significant about Kautsky’s book was that it was the
first comprehensive attempt to describe the foundation and rise of Christianity
using the method of historical materialism.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
used the method of historical materialism and applied it to social and
historical developments. In his book ‘Anti-Duhring’, Engels summarised what
this meant:
“The materialist conception of history
starts from the proposition that the production and, next to production, the
exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in
every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is
distributed and society divided into classes or estates is dependent upon what
is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this
point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions
are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal
truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They
are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each
particular epoch.”
Karl Kautsky, therefore, rejected
the metaphysical myths behind Christianity – the miracles, supernatural events,
and so on – and attempted to describe its origins and rise through the social
conditions that existed in the Roman Empire.
The classical description of the
origins of Christianity is as outlined in the New Testament. The gospels of
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are taken as historical accounts of real events in
the first thirty five years of the first millennium: how Jesus was born
miraculously, how he performed miracles and preached alongside his twelve
disciples, how he was crucified for his preaching and how he arose from the
dead. The gospels are taken to be eyewitness accounts by four of the disciples.
Despite harassment, persecution
and innumerable martyrs, the superior ideas of the Christians – and
particularly the offer of life after death and the redemption of human sins by
the crucifixion of Jesus – led to an increase of support for Christianity until
it became an unstoppable force eventually recognised by the Roman Emperor
Constantine. The rest, as they say, is history.
This is the ‘official’ history of
the Church…and most of it is a fairy-tale. For Marxists the question has to be
asked, what were the conditions in Palestine in the first century? Karl Kautsky
alludes to the fact that the Roman Empire was a slave-based system in which the
vast majority of the population were impoverished and lived from hand to mouth
for most of their lives.
And it is true that Palestine was
a society riven with bitter class conflicts and contradictions. The
characteristics of the entire period were turmoil, upheaval and revolt.
Overlying the class struggle was the additional factor of the national
oppression of the majority Semitic population by the Romans. Within Jewish
society, the priestly caste and the nobility were propped up by the Roman
regime for the greater exploitation of the mass of the population.
“The fundamental conflict was
between Roman, Herodian, and high priestly rulers, on the one hand, and the
Judean and Galilean villagers, whose produce supplied tribute for Caesar, taxes
for King Herod, and tithes and offerings for the priests and temple apparatus
on the other.” (Horsley, ‘Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs’ )
The Temple priests who were paid
tithes (church taxes) by the local peasantry were not a small group – some
scholars number them in the thousands. The Jewish King Herod ‘the Great’, who
died in 4 BCE [Before the Common Era], left a country economically exhausted
from the earlier Roman conquest and subsequent taxation.
“The Jewish agricultural
producers were now subject to a double taxation, probably amounting to well
over 40 per cent of their production. There were other Roman taxes as well,
which further added to the burden of the people, but the tribute was the major
drain.
“Coming, as it did, immediately
after a period of ostensible national independence under the Hasmonians (Jewish
kings), Roman domination was regarded as wholly illegitimate. The tribute was
seen as robbery. Indeed it was called outright slavery by militant teachers
such as Judas of Galilee, who organised active resistance to the census (record
of people for tax purposes) when the Romans took over direct administration of
Judea in 6 CE.” [in the Common Era] (‘Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs’)
Revolts
The only contemporary account
there is of this history is that of Josephus, a Jewish general who fought
against the Romans during the revolt of 66 CE and who subsequently changed
sides. It is clear from his histories that this whole period was one of great
upheaval. There were many occasions when revolts of peasants were led by
popular anointed kings (or ‘messiahs’), all of which were viciously repressed.
It was not uncommon for whole towns to be razed and their inhabitants sold into
slavery.
These revolts reflected the
material conditions and class conflicts of the time, but they were invariably
dressed up in terms of messianic revivalism and religious aspirations. Given
the tradition and scripture of the Jews, these movements inevitably adopted the
mantles of scriptural leaders, including, notably, Joshua. There were, in fact,
many ‘Joshua’ sects at the time. (‘Jesus’ is a Romanised name which wouldn’t
have been recognised in Palestine at the time). Many of these cults had a
‘communist’ outlook with property shared in common within the community.
The writings of Josephus are the
only genuine surviving works written by a participant of the events. He
describes what he sees as the evil influence of seers and prophets on more than
one occasion, such as: “…Impostors and demagogues, under the disguise of divine
inspiration, provoked revolutionary actions and impelled the masses to act like
madmen. They led them out into the wilderness…” Josephus (‘Jewish Wars’)
mentions by name several of the seers, ‘prophets’ and revolutionaries who
stirred up the Jews, but the Joshua described in the New Testament does not
appear at any point in the voluminous work of his supposed contemporary,
Josephus.
The revolutionary-minded force in
this period was the peasantry, which strove time and again to throw off the
national and class oppression under which they laboured.
A small selection of commentaries
from Josephus illustrates the turmoil of the period:
“Many [Jewish peasants] turned to
banditry out of recklessness, and throughout the whole country there were
raids, and among the more daring, revolts…”
“…the whole of Judea was infested
with brigands…” (‘Jewish Wars’)
“Felix [Roman governor, 52-58 CE]
captured [revolutionary leader] Eleazar, who for twenty years had plundered the
country, as well as many of his associates, and sent them to Rome for trial.
The number of brigands that he crucified…was enormous.” (Josephus ,
‘Antiquities’)
Nothing could be further removed
from ‘silent night’! The revolutionary upheaval spilled over into a generalised
uprising in 66 CE, against the Romans and their collaborators, the Jewish
ruling class the high priests of the Temple. “…hostility and violent
factionalism flared between the high priests on the one side and the priests
and leaders of the Jerusalem masses on the other.” (‘Antiquities’)
Siege of Jerusalem
For the next four years there was
a bloody and protracted guerrilla war followed by a prolonged siege of
Jerusalem, during which the masses, fearing betrayal by the Jewish aristocracy
and high priests effectively took power into their own hands in Jerusalem. One
of their first acts in the revolt was the storming of the Temple and the
burning of the deeds and documents relating to the debts and taxes of the
peasantry. It was not surprising that the aristocracy and the high priests fled
the city to the safety of the Roman lines – including Josephus himself.
Even before this revolution,
Palestine had been a whirlpool of different cults and religious sects, most
based loosely on traditional Jewish scripture, but often coloured by the
widespread discontent with the collaboration of the priesthood and the
parasitism of the Temple culture. Among these would have been the ‘Joshua’ and
other messianic sects organised by a variety of charismatic leaders.
Following the bloody suppression
of the revolution and the capture of Jerusalem (during which the Temple was
destroyed) in 70 CE, tens of thousands of Jews fled the region and many
thousands more were enslaved. Such an enormous disaster could not fail to
affect the huge Jewish Diaspora, who fled from their homeland, spread round
every major city in the whole Roman Empire, including the larger cities like
Rome, Alexandria and the big cities in the East.
Long before the revolutionary
events, all manner of sects had taken root in the Jewish Diaspora communities
in parallel to those in Palestine itself. Within this lively sectarian milieu
was a Joshua cult developed by Paul, with a policy of converting non-Jews as
well as Jews. This sect, in effect, became the mainspring of modern
Christianity by, among other things, simplifying Jewish ‘Law’ to remove the
need for circumcision and strict dietary taboos.
All of the early Christian works,
which were circulating from the middle towards the end of the first century –
including the letters of Paul – were significantly missing any historical
narrative connecting Joshua to a real-life biography. It was only later that
the gospel of Mark (on which Matthew and Luke were based) was written as an
allegorical description of a life, composed to match the Joshua doctrine that
was becoming established. It was an expression of the growing confidence and
numerical strength of this particular sect. But it was also an expression of
the growing class division within the Christian community itself as it
accommodated to Roman society. Of the original communistic ideas of the Joshua
cults, there remain only a few hints and suggestions in the New Testament
today.
It was largely in polemics with
their former co-religionists, the Jews, and against the plethora of rival
proto-Christian sects that the early Church elaborated its doctrine in the
first decades of the second century. In parallel with the elaboration of
doctrine, the Church established an apparatus to maintain itself. The evidence
of the existence of a huge variety of early Christian sects has only come to
light recently precisely because this apparatus, once having established
itself, did its best to eliminate all others as ‘heresies,’ in the process
removing most of the evidence that other strands of the Joshua cult even
existed.
The question has to be asked as
to why Christianity grew over the next two centuries. It was not an
anti-slavery movement: slavery was ubiquitous throughout the Roman Empire and
Christians possessed slaves like anyone else. There is evidence that even
bishops just like well-to-do Romans owned slaves throughout this whole period.
Theological considerations were
secondary. The rigid and self-perpetuating bureaucracy which had grown within
the Church reflected the class divisions in society and had become an important
bulwark of the class system.
“In time the discourse and
sermons of the Christian leaders came to incorporate not only the formal
aspects of aristocratic status concerns but also the values and ideology of the
late Roman upper class.” (Salzman, ‘The Making of a Christian Aristocracy’)
Conversion
This comment refers to the period
following the so-called conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the early
fourth century, but long before this the Church was playing a key social and
economic role on behalf of the ruling class. Many officials of state were
Christian bishops or leaders. More importantly, they play a key role in the
management and organisation of local government.
In so far as it meant anything in
a Roman Empire facing terminal decline, they were the local government. Bishops
and Church officials collected tax, distributed alms (church-based charity) and
supervised local legal and land disputes. They were an unofficial ‘civil
service’ on behalf of the Roman bureaucracy long before Emperor Constantine
gave them imperial sanction. The Church fulfilled a social and economic
function, in managing and containing an increasing proportion of the poor and
dispossessed and for that reason, not because of a ‘spiritual awakening’ within
the ruling class, it was allowed to grow and develop.
The Church was able to fulfil
this role because it offered a safety valve for the aspirations of the masses.
It gave the peasantry their only opportunity to sit in the same building with
landlords and bishops (if not the same pews) and even if there was limited hope
in this world, they were at least offered the promise of equality with the rich
in the next. The Christians offered a messiah and ‘life after death’, in contrast
to the aloof and indifferent gods of Greece and Rome.
The Church bureaucracy
consciously developed policy (and theology) in its own interests, increasingly
identified with the interests of the ruling class. But in its structure and
outlook, it also anticipated the development of feudal society better than the
decaying slave-owning state. The Church didn’t campaign for emancipation, but
offered a new arrangement for exploitation.
As for the peasantry and city
poor: as long as they knew and accepted ‘their place’ in the rigid class
structure, for the poorest it offered a structure of alms, and support which
provided respite to the worst of their poverty and insecurity. Even if watered
down, it offered a sense of community. Almost uniquely in the Roman Empire, it
had a limited welfare structure, moreover one that offered belonging to a
national and even international church. For these reasons it had
disproportionate appeal to the poor and the oppressed; indeed it was ridiculed
for being a movement “of slaves and women.”
Persecution
Once it was backed by the power
of the state the Church destroyed its opponents. Roman persecution of the
Church in the first three centuries is greatly exaggerated, but it pales
against the terrible persecution that the Church visited on all the unorthodox
sects once it was backed by imperial power. Books and heretics were burnt.
Theological history was re-written. Myths were piled upon myths, century after
century. So much so that today even so-called ‘scholars’ treat the New Testament
like a true historical narrative and not as they should as a story, no more
true than ‘The Iliad’ or ‘Beowulf’.
Within a few hundred years any
evidence of the existence of other Christian sects, including their pre-history
in Palestine, was all but eliminated. The Church became – and remains to this
day – a powerful conservative force, politically, financially and
diplomatically (and at one time, militarily).
In his introduction to ‘A
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, Marx referred to
religion as “the sigh of the oppressed”. He explained that it is not
spirituality, or the lack of it, which breeds support for religion. It is the
alienation of the mass of the population from the class society in which they
find themselves.
The crisis of capitalism is at
root the crisis of a rotten economic system, but it manifests itself also as a
crisis of ideas. For millions of people their hopes and aspirations are so
stunted by the limits of the capitalist world that they project their hopes on
to a life after death. And just as in the first decades of the first
millennium, so also in the age of capitalism, new religious and messianic
movements reflect the intellectual and moral impasse of a failed and failing
society. Marx continued:
“…To call on them to give up
their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition
that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo,
the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
Thus he made it clear that it is
not a question of religion being “abolished”. The idea is absurd. To combat
superstition and ignorance, the task for socialists is to struggle against the
material conditions upon which these things grow – and that means above all, a
struggle against capitalism.
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