Christianity began as a Jewish messianic and apocalyptic movement centred upon the expectation that God would intervene in history, restore Israel and vindicate his people. It was simpler than later imperial Christianity, but probably not simple in the sense of possessing one uniform original creed. The earliest movement consisted of Jewish groups attempting to understand Jesus within the religious and political expectations of first-century Judaism.
Jesus was proclaimed as the Messiah—God’s anointed agent—although “Messiah” did not have one universally agreed meaning. It could signify a Davidic king, a liberator of Israel, an apocalyptic judge or a divinely appointed restorer. The movement’s earliest hopes appear to have concerned the imminent intervention of God, the restoration of Israel and liberation from the powers that oppressed it.
Jewish messianism was certainly wishful and imaginative, but it arose from real historical experience: conquest, exile, foreign domination and the repeated collapse of Jewish political independence. Ancient texts concerning kingship, restoration and divine deliverance were reread as promises that God would eventually reverse Israel’s humiliation. What began as historical hope gradually became apocalyptic expectation.
No writing by Jesus survives, and there is no contemporary first-hand account of his life or teaching. Everything known about him comes through reports written by others, decades after the events they describe. None of the canonical Gospels can be securely identified as the testimony of a known eyewitness.
The four Gospels survive as distinct literary works, but they are formally anonymous. Their traditional attribution to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John cannot be established from the texts themselves. Biblical source and redaction criticism has also provided strong evidence that the Gospels were not four wholly independent accounts. Their final authors or editors drew upon earlier reports, inherited traditions, written sources and, in some cases, one another. Matthew and Luke made extensive use of Mark while incorporating additional material from elsewhere; John appears to have developed through successive stages of composition and editing.
The precise number and identity of the people involved cannot now be recovered. Each completed Gospel may have received its final form from one principal writer or editor, but that final literary unity should not be confused with unity of origin. The Gospels are better understood as composite products assembled from an unknown number of earlier voices, texts and traditions than as the unmediated testimony of four individual witnesses.
The earliest complete copies of the Gospels are likewise only the earliest complete copies that happen to have survived. They stand at the end of a much earlier manuscript tradition represented by incomplete papyri, damaged leaves and isolated fragments. Completeness does not make them original or uniquely authoritative; it means only that, unlike the earlier surviving remnants, their entire texts have been preserved. Behind each complete Gospel lies an unknown number of lost, partial, revised and differently worded copies.
The earliest Gospel, conventionally identified as Mark, is generally inferred to have been composed about forty years after Jesus’ death, although no first-century manuscript of it survives. Our earliest Gospel witnesses consist largely of fragmentary papyrus copies—some no more than damaged scraps—from the second and third centuries. Thousands of Greek New Testament manuscripts survive altogether, but most are considerably later.
The earliest surviving complete New Testament is the mid-fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, which was preserved for centuries at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai. Comparison of the surviving manuscripts reveals numerous textual variants. Most are relatively minor, but some involve substantial passages or significant differences in wording. They demonstrate that the text passed through a long and sometimes unstable process of copying, correction and transmission.
After Jesus’ execution, his followers reinterpreted his apparent failure through belief in his resurrection and exaltation. The idea that his death possessed saving significance existed long before Constantine. Paul’s authentic letters, written approximately two decades after Jesus’ death, are the earliest surviving Christian documents. They already present Jesus as an exalted heavenly figure whose death and resurrection possess redemptive and ultimately cosmic significance. Some passages have also been interpreted as presenting Jesus—or the exalted heavenly figure whom Paul calls the Christos—as pre-existent, although the meaning of these passages remains disputed.
These ideas therefore cannot simply be attributed to fourth-century imperial Christianity. They had already begun to develop during the movement’s first generation. That does not establish that they formed part of Jesus’ own teaching. It establishes only that they were present by the time of our earliest surviving Christian writings—which are Paul’s letters rather than accounts written by Jesus or by demonstrable eyewitnesses.
Paul is therefore crucial, although he did not necessarily invent every idea he expressed; he sometimes quotes traditions that appear to predate him. He nevertheless supplied the earliest surviving sustained interpretation of Jesus’ death as an event affecting sin, salvation, resurrection and humanity as a whole.
The Jewish diaspora had already carried Jewish belief far beyond Judaea, establishing Greek-speaking communities throughout the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and bringing them into regular contact with Gentile society. Their synagogues, scriptures and social networks provided important channels through which the Jesus movement first expanded. The mission to Gentiles appears to have arisen partly through the movement’s spread within this diaspora environment.
Paul did not create this geographical and cultural dispersal, but he gave it a decisive new direction. By teaching that Gentiles could belong to the messianic community without becoming Jews, undergoing circumcision or assuming the full obligations of the Mosaic law, he provided a theological basis for their direct admission.
Paul did not, therefore, single-handedly transform Christianity into a universal religion. The diaspora had already created the geographical, linguistic and cultural conditions for expansion. Paul’s decisive contribution was to formulate the theological argument by which a Jewish messianic movement could become a religion addressed to humanity at large.
Subsequent generations developed the movement into a more elaborate religion by using Greek philosophical concepts to define who Jesus was, how he was related to God, and what significance should be attached to his death and resurrection. Different Christian groups produced competing answers. Some regarded him as a human being chosen and exalted by God; others as a pre-existent heavenly figure; and still others as divine in a fuller sense. They also disagreed about whether salvation came through faith, moral transformation, revealed knowledge, sacramental participation, obedience or the redemptive effect of Jesus’ death. These disputes continued for centuries and eventually produced the doctrines, creeds and condemnations of later Christian orthodoxy.
The Roman Empire did not originate these theological developments, nor did Constantine personally invent Christianity’s principal doctrines. By the fourth century, many of the central disputes were already well established. The Empire’s decisive contribution was to provide the institutional and political machinery through which particular answers could be selected, formally defined and imposed as authoritative.
Imperial patronage transformed disputes among Christian communities into matters requiring authoritative settlement. Bishops assembled under imperial protection; creeds were formulated; particular interpretations were approved; others were condemned; and ecclesiastical offices acquired legal and political power. Constantine’s reign produced immense changes in the Church’s status, structure and machinery of doctrinal settlement. The Nicene settlement also offered the emperor the possibility of a more unified religious institution capable of supporting imperial cohesion.
Christianity did not therefore begin as a fully formed religion that Rome later corrupted in a single decisive act. The transformation began almost immediately after Jesus’ death. A Jewish teacher and failed messianic claimant was reinterpreted as the risen and exalted Anointed One; his execution came to be understood as a redemptive sacrifice; the hoped-for deliverer of Israel became a universal saviour; and an imminent expectation of divine intervention developed into an increasingly elaborate theological system.
Rome inherited a religion that had already been developing for nearly three centuries. What the Empire added was institutional authority: councils, creeds, ecclesiastical law, approved doctrine, coercive power and permanence. It selected particular versions from among competing Christianities, codified them as orthodoxy and gave them the power of the imperial state.
Codicil
It may be one of Christianity’s strangest paradoxes: doctrines that can appear intellectually implausible have inspired art of almost unbearable beauty.
Part of the explanation is that the music is often responding not to theology as a logical system, but to the human experiences concealed within it: birth, suffering, loss, guilt, tenderness, mortality, hope and the longing to transcend death. Doctrine supplies the vocabulary and imagery; the composer draws out the emotional truth.
Perhaps this is what continues to draw me so strongly towards Christianity: the extraordinary breadth of human feeling it can accommodate. I may doubt its doctrines, yet Bach’s St Matthew Passion has moved me to tears. Christianity’s greatest gift to civilisation may lie not in the certainty of its answers, but in the music, poetry, painting and architecture through which humanity has expressed its deepest grief, wonder, tenderness and hope.
Theology and Beauty
Christianity’s doctrines may appear historically constructed and intellectually implausible, yet they have inspired works of sublime beauty. Karl Jenkins’s haunting setting of Ave verum corpus, performed here by the Choir of the University of Economics in Katowice, is one such work. The theology may be doubted; the depth of human feeling it has called forth cannot be.
I have, then, a love–hate relationship with Christianity. I recoil from its doctrinal legalism—the elaborate machinery of sin, sacrifice, guilt and salvation—but remain deeply drawn to the breadth of feeling embodied in its stories, rituals and art. Other religions undoubtedly contain comparable depths, though they express them through different musical and symbolic languages. Christianity speaks to me with particular force because its emotional world has shaped the civilisation in which I learned to feel. I may reject much of what it asks me to believe, yet I cannot reject what Bach’s St Matthew Passion awakens in me.
