Beyond Belief Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE

  From the Feast of Agape to the Nicene Creed

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas

  CHAPTER THREE

  God’s Word or Human Words?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Canon of Truth and the Triumph of John

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Constantine and the Catholic Church

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Elaine Pagels

  Copyright

  FOR KENT

  with love

  There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

  BILL VIOLA, VIDEO ARTIST

  CHAPTER ONE

  FROM THE FEAST OF AGAPE TO THE NICENE CREED

  On a bright Sunday morning in February, shivering in a T-shirt and running shorts, I stepped into the vaulted stone vestibule of the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York to catch my breath and warm up. Since I had not been in church for a long time, I was startled by my response to the worship in progress—the soaring harmonies of the choir singing with the congregation; and the priest, a woman in bright gold and white vestments, proclaiming the prayers in a clear, resonant voice. As I stood watching, a thought came to me: Here is a family that knows how to face death.

  That morning I had gone for an early morning run while my husband and two-and-a-half-year-old son were still sleeping. The previous night I had been sleepless with fear and worry. Two days before, a team of doctors at Babies Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, had performed a routine checkup on our son, Mark, a year and six months after his successful open-heart surgery. The physicians were shocked to find evidence of a rare lung disease. Disbelieving the results, they tested further for six hours before they finally called us in to say that Mark had pulmonary hypertension, an invariably fatal disease, they told us. How much time? I asked. “We don’t know; a few months, a few years.”

  The following day, a team of doctors urged us to authorize a lung biopsy, a painful and invasive procedure. How could this help? It couldn’t, they explained; but the procedure would let them see how far the disease had progressed. Mark was already exhausted by the previous day’s ordeal. Holding him, I felt that if more masked strangers poked needles into him in an operating room, he might lose heart—literally—and die. We refused the biopsy, gathered Mark’s blanket, clothes, and Peter Rabbit, and carried him home.

  Standing in the back of that church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable. Before that time, I could only ward off what I had heard and felt the day before.

  I returned often to that church, not looking for faith but because, in the presence of that worship and the people gathered there—and in a smaller group that met on weekdays in the church basement for mutual encouragement—my defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope. In that church I gathered new energy, and resolved, over and over, to face whatever awaited us as constructively as possible for Mark, and for the rest of us.

  When people would say to me, “Your faith must be of great help to you,” I would wonder, What do they mean? What is faith? Certainly not simple assent to the set of beliefs that worshipers in that church recited every week (“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . .”)—traditional statements that sounded strange to me, like barely intelligible signals from the surface, heard at the bottom of the sea. Such statements seemed to me then to have little to do with whatever transactions we were making with one another, with ourselves, and—so it was said—with invisible beings. I was acutely aware that we met there driven by need and desire; yet sometimes I dared hope that such communion has the potential to transform us.

  I am a historian of religion, and so, as I visited that church, I wondered when and how being a Christian became virtually synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs. From historical reading, I knew that Christianity had survived brutal persecution and flourished for generations—even centuries—before Christians formulated what they believed into creeds. The origins of this transition from scattered groups to a unified community have left few traces. Although the apostle Paul, about twenty years after Jesus’ death, stated “the gospel,” which, he says, “I too received” (“that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day”),1 it may have been more than a hundred years later that some Christians, perhaps in Rome, attempted to consolidate their group against the demands of a fellow Christian named Marcion, whom they regarded as a false teacher, by introducing formal statements of belief into worship.2 But only in the fourth century, after the Roman emperor Constantine himself converted to the new faith—or at least decriminalized it—did Christian bishops, at the emperor’s command, convene in the city of Nicaea, on the Turkish coast, to agree upon a common statement of beliefs—the so-called Nicene Creed, which defines the faith for many Christians to this day.

  Yet I know from my own encounters with people in that church, both upstairs and down, believers, agnostics, and seekers—as well as people who don’t belong to any church—that what matters in religious experience involves much more than what we believe (or what we do not believe). What is Christianity, and what is religion, I wondered, and why do so many of us still find it compelling, whether or not we belong to a church, and despite difficulties we may have with particular beliefs or practices? What is it about Christian tradition that we love—and what is it that we cannot love?

  From the beginning, what attracted outsiders who walked into a gathering of Christians, as I did on that February morning, was the presence of a group joined by spiritual power into an extended family. Many must have come as I had, in distress; and some came without money. In Rome, the sick who frequented the temples of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, expected to pay when they consulted his priests about herbs, exercise, baths, and medicine. These priests also arranged for visitors to spend nights sleeping in the temple precincts, where the god was said to visit his suppliants in dreams. Similarly, those who sought to enter into the mysteries of the Egyptian goddess Isis, seeking her protection and blessings in this life, and eternal life beyond the grave, were charged considerable initiation fees and spent more to buy the ritual clothing, offerings, and equipment.

  Irenaeus, the leader of an important Christian group in provincial Gaul in the second century, wrote that many newcomers came to Christian meeting places hoping for miracles, and some found them: “We heal the sick by laying hands on them, and drive out demons,” the destructive energies that cause mental instability and emotional anguish. Christians took no money, yet Irenaeus acknowledged no limits to what the spirit could do: “We even raise the dead, many of whom are still alive among us, and completely healthy.”3

  Even without a miracle, those in need could find immediate practical help almost anywhere in the empire, whose great cities—Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch, Carthage, and Rome itself—were then, as now, crowded with people from throughout the known world. Inhabitants of the vast shantytowns that surrounded these cities often tried to survive by begging, prostitution, and stealing. Yet Tertullian, a Christian spokesman of the second century, writes that, unlike members of other clubs and societies that collected dues and fees to pay for feasts, members of the Christian “family” contributed mo
ney voluntarily to a common fund to support orphans abandoned in the streets and garbage dumps. Christian groups also brought food, medicines, and companionship to prisoners forced to work in mines, banished to prison islands, or held in jail. Some Christians even bought coffins and dug graves to bury the poor and criminals, whose corpses otherwise would lie unburied beyond the city walls. Like Irenaeus, the African convert Tertullian emphasizes that among Christians there is no buying and selling of any kind in what belongs to God. On a certain day, each one, if he likes, puts in a small gift, but only if he wants to do so, and only if he be able, for there is no compulsion; everything is voluntary.4

  Such generosity, which ordinarily could be expected only from one’s own family, attracted crowds of newcomers to Christian groups, despite the risks. The sociologist Rodney Stark notes that, shortly before Irenaeus wrote, a plague had ravaged cities and towns throughout the Roman empire, from Asia Minor though Italy and Gaul.5 The usual response to someone suffering from inflamed skin and pustules, whether a family member or not, was to run, since nearly everyone infected died in agony. Some epidemiologists estimate that the plague killed a third to a half of the imperial population. Doctors could not, of course, treat the disease, and they too fled the deadly virus. Galen, the most famous physician of his age, who attended the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, survived what people later called Galen’s plague by escaping to a country estate until it was over.

  But some Christians were convinced that God’s power was with them to heal or alleviate suffering. They shocked their pagan neighbors by staying to care for the sick and dying, believing that, if they themselves should die, they had the power to overcome death. Even Galen was impressed:

  [For] the people called Christians . . . contempt of death is obvious to us every day, and also their self-control in sexual matters. . . . They also include people who, in self-discipline . . . in matters of food and drink, and in their keen pursuit of justice, have attained a level not inferior to that of genuine philosophers.6

  Why did Christians act in such extraordinary ways? They would say that their strength came from their encounter with divine power—but it was a power wholly unlike that of the gods whose temples crowded the city streets, and whose images adorned the theaters and public baths. Jupiter and Diana, Isis and Mithras, required their worshipers to offer devotion, pouring out wine, making sacrifices, and contributing money to the priests at their temples. Such gods were understood to act, like human beings, out of self-interest. But Jews and Christians believed that their God, who created humankind, actually loved the human race, and evoked love in return. Jesus succinctly summarized Jewish teaching when he said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”7 What God requires is that human beings love one another and offer help—even, or especially, to the neediest.

  Such convictions became the practical basis of a radical new social structure. Rodney Stark suggests that we read the following passage from Matthew’s gospel “as if for the very first time,” in order to feel the power of this new morality as Jesus’ early followers and their pagan neighbors must have felt it:8

  For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. . . . Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.9

  These precepts could hardly have been universally practiced, yet Tertullian says that members of what he calls the “peculiar Christian society” practiced them often enough to attract public notice: “What marks us in the eyes of our enemies is our practice of lovingkindness: ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’ ”10

  Tertullian also says that outsiders ridiculed Christians “because we call each other brother and sister.” Yet when he writes his Defence of the Christians, he adds that members of “God’s family” also believed that the human family as a whole is interrelated. Thus, he says, “we are your brothers and sisters as well, by the law of our common mother, nature,” although, he concedes, perhaps it is more appropriate to call brother and sister those who have come to know God as their father, and who, from the same womb of a common ignorance, have agonized into the clear light of truth.11

  The agonizing birth process he refers to is baptism, for to join God’s family one had to die—symbolically—and become a new person. The apostle Paul had said that whoever is plunged into the baptismal waters and submerged, as in the waters of death, dies to his or her former self.12 For many Christians this was a wrenching event that severed all familiar bonds, including, of course, those with the families of their birth. Tertullian describes how non-Christian families rejected those who joined this illicit sect:

  The husband . . . casts the wife out of his house; the father . . . disinherits the son; the master commands the slave to depart from his presence: it is a huge offence for anyone to be reformed by this hated name [Christian].13

  Why a “huge offence”? Because in the eyes of their relatives, converts were joining a cult of criminals—a choice that could be suicidal for the convert, and disastrous for the family left behind. The Roman senator Tacitus, who despised Christians for their superstitions, probably would have agreed that Tertullian reflected public opinion when he said that, for outsiders, conversion made the initiate “an enemy of the public good; of the gods; of public morals,” of all that patriotic and religious Romans held sacred.14 Tertullian knew what had happened during the summer of 202 in his own African city, Carthage, where a twenty-two-year-old aristocrat named Vibia Perpetua, recently married and the mother of an infant son, resolved to undergo baptism along with four other young people, at least two of them slaves. When the magistrate asked whether she was a Christian, she said she was. She was arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to be torn apart by beasts in the public arena—a death sentence ordinarily reserved for slaves—along with her fellow converts.

  Perpetua recorded in her diary what happened when her patrician, gray-haired father arrived at the prison:

  While we were under arrest, my father, out of love for me, was trying to persuade me and shake my resolution. “Father,” I said, “do you see this vessel, or waterpot, or whatever it is?” “Yes, I do,” he said. “Could it be called by any other name than what it is?” I asked; and he said, “No.” “Well, so too, I cannot be called anything other than what I am, Christian.”15

  Because she was repudiating her family name, Perpetua wrote, “my father was so angry . . . that he started towards me as though he would tear out my eyes; but he left it at that, and departed.”16 A few days later, hoping that his daughter might be given a hearing, Perpetua says, “My father arrived from the city, exhausted with worry, and came to see me to try to persuade me. ‘Daughter,’ ” he said, understandably desperate, have pity . . . on me, your father, if I deserve to be called your father; if I have loved you more than all your brothers. . . . Do not abandon me to people’s scorn. Think of your brothers; think of your mother and your aunt; think of your child, who will not be able to live without you. Give up your pride! You will destroy all of us! None of us will ever be able to speak freely again if anything happens to you.17

  Perpetua wrote, “My father spoke this way out of love for me, kissing my hands and throwing himself down before me. With tears in his eyes . . . he left me in great sorrow.”18

  Then, on the day when the governor interrogated the prisoners, her father arrived carrying her infant son and continued to plead with her, she says, until the governor “ordered him to be thrown to the ground and beaten with a rod. I felt sorry for father, just as if I myself had been beaten; I grieved for his misery in old age.”19 But Perpetua believed that she now belonged to God’s family and maintained her detachment. On the birthday of Emperor Geta, she walked calmly from prison into the amphitheater “as one beloved of God . . . putting down everyone’s star
e by her own intense gaze,”20 to die with her new relatives, who included her slave Felicitas as her sister and Revocatus, also a slave, as her brother.

  To join the “peculiar Christian society,” then, a candidate had to repudiate his or her family, along with its values and practices. Justin Martyr, called “the philosopher,” baptized in Rome around the year 140, says that he had come to see himself as one who had been “brought up in bad habits and evil customs”21 to accept distorted values and worship demons as gods. He tells how he and others had given up promiscuity, magic, greed, wealth, and racial hatred:

  We, out of every tribe of people . . . who used to take pleasure in promiscuity, now embrace chastity alone; we, who once had recourse to magic, dedicate ourselves to the good God; we, who valued above everything else acquiring wealth and possessions, now bring what we have into a common fund, and share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed other people, and refused to live with people of another tribe because of their different customs, now live intimately with them.22

  Every initiate, Justin adds, who “has been convinced, and agreed to our teaching,” would pledge to live as a person transformed.

  Having changed his or her mind (which is the meaning of the Latin word paenitentia) about the past, the candidate could undergo the baptismal “bath” that cleanses away its pollution. The initiate, often shivering beside a river, undressed and went underwater, to emerge wet and naked, “born again.” And just as any Roman newborn would first be presented to the father to accept—or reject—before it could be embraced as a member of the family, so the newly baptized would be presented before “God, the Father of all.” Now the initiate, no longer called, as before, by his or her paternal name, would hear the initiator pronouncing the name of the “Father of all,” of Jesus Christ, and of the holy spirit. Then, clothed in new garments, the reborn Christian would be fed a mixture of milk and honey, the food of newborn infants, and be brought in to greet “those we call brothers and sisters” with a kiss. Now members of the assembled community would invite the newcomer to share bread and wine in the eucharist (literally, “thanksgiving”), the sacred family meal. Justin says that believers call baptism “illumination, because all who receive it are illuminated in their understanding.”23 These simple, everyday acts—taking off old clothes, bathing, putting on new clothes, then sharing bread and wine—took on, for Jesus’ followers, powerful meanings.