Conflict and the Cultural Evolution of Christianity: Clash of Memes

One of my biggest frustrations as a Christian is similar to one of my biggest frustrations as a patriotic American. I believe the basic values of my faith are outstanding: peace, love and understanding; love of God and neighbor; unconditional love for all, including society's rejects and the least advantaged members of society. I call these Christian values because I found them in the gospels. In fact, to me they are the hermeneutic by which I understand the rest of the scriptures. Yet there are folks using the same label who claim to be the true Christians but have a very different view of what the label means, just as there are "patriots" who support values that I think are inimical to what my country stands for. I think the historical study of Christianity helps to identify the issues and to see where I think the religion has gone off the rails. While I think the basic values I've identified are true and good, the phenomena which produced the Christian movement are all too human. I'd like to look at the divisions which developed early on in the Christian movement as examples of what atheist Richard Dawkins calls memes and the process of cultural evolution

 

#1. Judaizers vs. Paulists.

Marcus Borg argues persuasively that Jesus was crucified mainly because His gospel of compassion clashed with the prevailing Jewish emphasis on purity and the law which Jews regarded (with good reason) as crucial to their cultural identity. Jesus hobnobbed with publicans, sinners, prostitutes and other lowlifes regarded as unclean pariahs in a Jewish society trying to hold itself together under Roman occupation. I agree with Albert Schweitzer, the great theologian and author of The Quest for the Historical Jesus, that Jesus may have been "too historical". By that, he meant that, along with His devotion to love of fellow humans, Jesus had the outlook and priorities of a first century messianic Jew who expected the imminent advent of the Kingdom of God.

Ironically, after Jesus' death, leadership of his movement passed to outsiders. His reputed brother, James the Just became the head of the Jerusalem Church, presiding over the Jerusalem Council to which Peter and the other Apostles reported. James had been critical of Jesus' wayward ways and reportedly participated in an attempted family intervention while Jesus was with his followers, but claimed membership in the inner circle of Apostles as a result of a reported visitation by the resurrected Christ. Unlike Jesus, who had the reputation of enjoying food, drink, and the company of lowlifes, James was an ascetic who didn't drink, eat meat, or own more than a single garment. Jesus locked horns with the Pharisees from what they saw as His lax observance of the Jewish law, but James the Just won the respect of the Pharisees and Zealots for outdoing them in his practice and devotion to the Law.

Next, along came another outsider, Saul of Tarsus (aka,Paul). He never knew Jesus in person, and actually persecuted Christians. He claimed membership in the club, again by virtue of an encounter with Jesus in a vision. Paul brought Christianity to the Gentiles, but in so doing relaxed what the Jewish Christians thought were the rules of admission: adherence to the Law. To be a Christian, one first had to become a Jew. Paul taught. on the other hand, that to be "justified' before God as a Christian, one would only need to have faith in Christ and His sacrifice. James countered with an epistle that "faith without works is dead." Paul would convert a Gentile congregation with this teaching, and James' minders from Jerusalem would arrive and tell them they were doing it wrong (reminiscent of more recent controversies over proper baptism).

As Paul's Gentile churches grew in number, the leadership base grew and the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem probably felt their influence diminishing. Peter, Jesus' right-hand-man, who was mainly in Antioch at the time, was apparently caught in the middle of in-fighting between the factions. Paul criticized Peter because he discontinued eating with Gentiles after representatives from the "circumcision faction" from Jerusalem Council paid him a visit. Paul had to appear in Jerusalem to answer charges that he was violating the Torah and misrepresenting Yeshua's teachings. James instructed him that to dispel such rumors he must go in the accompaniment of four men who have taken a vow of purity and purify himself in the Temple along with them. On the way, he was attacked by a mob, which Acts is at pains to point out was the non-Christian Jews, and taken into protective custody by the Romans.Subsequently, Paul was taken to Rome to plead his case before the Emperor. James, who worried the Temple because of his large following and "Super Jew" routine, was arrested and executed. Eisenmann believes that the assassination of James triggered the uprising against the Romans that eventually led to the Roman sacking of Jerusalem. This dealt a fatal blow to the Judaizers, who soon disappeared from history.

 

2. Paulists vs. Gnostics.

After the defeat of the Juaizers, the victorious Paulists were faced with another challenge, which might be termed the Hellenizers, especially Gnostics, who wanted to purge Christianity of its Jewish roots and model it along the lines of Greco-Roman mystery religions. The first of these, Marcion, wasn't a full-fledged Gnostic, but he was a precursor of the effort to portray the Jewish Creator God as an inferior, evil God and Jesus' mission as that of liberating people from that false God and enlightening them to a higher god.