Beyond Belief Read online

  As I began sometimes to participate in church services after decades of absence, I experienced the power of worship in new ways. I had grown up nominally Protestant, and thought of ritual as empty form, but now I saw how it could join people of diverse cultures and viewpoints into a single community, and focus and renew their energies. But, apart from these effects, what do such acts mean, and what does it mean to join such a community? These questions are not easy to answer. Many people have tried to impute a single, definitive meaning shared by all “early Christians”; but first-century evidence—much of it from the New Testament—tells a different story.24 Various groups interpreted baptism in quite different ways; and those who ate bread and drank wine together to celebrate “the Lord’s supper” often could not confine the meaning of their worship to any single interpretation.

  One of the earliest sources, for example, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles to the Gentiles, shows that members of certain early groups of Jesus’ followers did not think of themselves as Christians—as we think of Christians—as separate from Jews, but as God’s people—by which some apparently meant Jews who revered Jesus as the great interpreter of God’s law, the Torah. Written in Syria about ten years before the New Testament gospels of Matthew and Luke,25 this writing, known as the Didache (Greek for “teaching”), opens with a succinct summary of God’s law, along with a negative version of the so-called golden rule: “The Way of Life is this: First, you shall love the God who made you, and your neighbor as yourself; and whatever you do not want to have done to you, do not do to another.”26 The Didache quotes other sayings that Matthew and Luke, writing perhaps about ten years later, will also attribute to Jesus:

  Bless those who curse you; pray for your enemies . . . love those who hate you. . . . If anyone smites you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. . . . Give to everyone who asks you, and do not refuse —although its editor adds a prudent warning not included in the New Testament: “Let your money sweat in your hands until you know to whom you are giving.”27

  Thus the Didache sets forth what the “way of life” demands, mingling the Ten Commandments with sayings best known to Christians from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Like many other pious Jews, the author amplifies these sayings with moral warnings similar to those his contemporaries directed against what they regarded as the everyday crimes of pagan culture, including sex with children, often slave boys, abortion, and killing newborns:

  You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not have sexual intercourse with boys . . . you shall not practice magic; you shall not murder the child in the womb, nor kill newborns . . . you shall not turn away the destitute.28

  Then, after warning them not to follow the “way of death”—the way especially of the “advocates of the rich,” who “turn away the poor and oppress those who suffer, and judge the poor unjustly”—the author, like Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, urges his hearers to “be perfect.” But, unlike Matthew, the Didache explains that “being perfect” suggests “bearing the whole yoke of the Lord”—that is, obeying the whole divine law.29 Also, unlike Matthew, this anonymous follower of Jesus adds, more practically, “If you cannot [be perfect], do what you can.”

  The historian Jonathan Draper suggests that one early version of the Didache reveals a group of Jesus’ followers who were still participating in the life of the Jewish community in their home city in Syria. When members of this group baptized newcomers, they understood baptism as their fellow Jews did then, and still do today: as a “bath” that purifies outsiders—that is, Gentiles—who seek admission to God’s people, Israel. The point of this early and influential manual, Draper shows, is to demonstrate how non-Jews may become part of God’s people; that is, to offer, just as the title promises, “the teaching of the twelve apostles to the Gentiles.”30 The Didache provides these Gentiles an exposition of the “way of life” set forth in the Hebrew Scriptures as Jesus interpreted it, and then shows how Gentiles willing to follow that “way” may be baptized, so that they, too, can share in the blessings of God’s coming kingdom.

  Finally, the Didache tells how the initiate, who fasts and prays before being baptized, would have learned how sharing in this simple meal of bread and wine links the human family gathered for worship with “God, our Father,” and with “Jesus, [his] servant” (or his “child,” as the Greek term pais may be translated). And by “breaking bread” together, his people celebrate the way God has brought together people who once were scattered, and has joined them as one:

  As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains but was brought together and became one loaf, so let your people be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom.31

  Those speaking this prayer in unison ended by calling—in an ancient Aramaic phrase some Christians invoke to this day—for the imminent coming of the Lord: “Let grace come, and let this world pass away. . . . Maran atha! [Our Lord, come!] Amen.”32 According to Draper’s analysis, these are Jews who revere Jesus as “God’s servant” and believe that his coming signals Israel’s restoration at the end of time.

  But other early followers of Jesus, like the majority ever since, saw the sacred meal in a much stranger—even macabre—way: as eating human flesh and drinking human blood. Only twenty years after Jesus’ death, Paul declared that Jesus himself commanded his followers to do this. Paul, like the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, tells how, on the night Jesus was betrayed, while [the disciples] were eating, [Jesus] took bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take: this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it, and he said to them, “This is my blood.”33

  Tertullian satirizes the reaction of outsiders to this practice: “We are accused of observing a sacred ritual in which we kill a little child and eat it.”34 He writes, No doubt [the Christian] would say, “You must get a child still very young, who does not know what it means to die, and can smile under your knife; and bread to collect the gushing blood. . . . Come, plunge your knife into the infant. . . . Or, if that is someone else’s job, simply stand before a human being dying before it has really lived. . . . Take the fresh young blood, saturate your bread with it, and eat freely.”35

  Despite his sarcasm, Tertullian cannot dispel the shocking fact that the Christian “mystery” invites initiates to eat human flesh—even if only symbolically. Pagans might be repelled by the practice of instructing newcomers to drink wine as human blood, but devout Jews, whose very definition of kosher (pure) food requires that it be drained of all blood, would be especially disgusted.36

  But, in their own time, many Jews and Gentiles might have recognized the eucharist as typical of ancient cult worship. Justin Martyr the philosopher worried that pagans would dismiss these rituals with contempt and charge that Christians were simply copying what worshipers in the so-called mystery religions did every day in their exotic cults. Justin admits that the priests who presided over the various temples of “devils”—the gods of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Asia Minor—often asked their initiates to perform “washings” like baptism, and that priests of the Persian sun god Mithras and the Greek Dionysus “command[ed] the same things to be done” as Jesus allegedly did—even “eating the flesh and drinking the blood” of their god in their sacred meals.37 But Justin insists that these supposed similarities are actually imitations of Christian worship inspired by demons who hope to “deceive and seduce the human race”38 into thinking that the Christian cult is no different from the mystery cults. Justin might have worried more had he foreseen that, from the fourth century on, Christians would celebrate a new festival—the birthday of Jesus—on December 25, the birthday of the sun god Mithras, around the time of the winter solstice, when the waning sun is reborn as the days grow longer.

  Yet the followers of Jesus invoked the mystery cults less than Jewish tradition as they struggled with a practical—and painful—problem. If Jesus was God’s messiah, wh
y did he die such a hideous death? This question troubled Paul himself, who, like many others, wrestled to reconcile the crucifixion with his belief in Jesus’ divine mission. In the decades after his death, some followers of Jesus in Jerusalem invoked religious tradition to suggest that, just as animal sacrifices were offered in the Temple, so Jesus had died as a sacrificial offering. And just as those who brought goats, sheep, or bulls to sacrifice afterward feasted on the slain carcasses, so, some suggested, those who benefit from this human sacrifice might appropriate its benefits by symbolically “eating” the sacrificial victim. By placing the drama of Jesus’ death at the center of their sacred meal, his followers transformed what others would see as total catastrophe—what Paul calls “scandal”39—into religious paradox: in the depths of human defeat they claimed to find the victory of God.40

  Seen this way, Jesus’ capture, torture, and death were not, they insisted, simply disastrous. These events had not devastated their hopes, as someone might think who heard what happened from the disciple who concluded ruefully that “we had hoped that he was the one to deliver Israel.”41 Mark insists that Jesus was not captured because his followers lacked the strength to fight for him, after one of them fought with his sword and wounded a member of the arresting party but was routed and fled like the rest. Rather, Mark says, Jesus moved deliberately toward his dreadful death because he recognized that it was somehow “necessary”42—but necessary for what?

  Mark repeats what some of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem had begun to say—that Jesus foresaw his own death, and voluntarily offered himself as a sacrifice. Giving his disciples bread, he told them to “take, eat; this is my body.”43 Mark says that after he had given his disciples wine to drink, he told them, “This is my blood . . . poured out for many.”44 Matthew invokes the theme of sacrificial atonement, adding to Mark’s account that Jesus’ blood is “poured out for many, for the forgiveness of sins.”45 Mark and Paul include as well, in different ways, the image of sacrificial blood ratifying a covenant. Mark looks back to the covenant of Moses, recalling how Moses threw the blood of sacrificial oxen upon the people, saying, “Behold, the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you.”46 So now, Mark suggests, Jesus anticipates shedding what he calls “my blood of the covenant.”47 But Paul, instead of looking back to the Mosaic covenant, looks forward to the new—and better—covenant prophesied by Jeremiah:

  Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel. . . . Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers. . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people . . . and they shall all know me . . . and I will remember their sin no more.48

  Thus Paul depicts Jesus offering wine to his disciples with the words “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.”49

  We do not know for sure whether Jesus actually said these words. Some historians believe that he must have said something like them; others believe that as his followers struggled to come to terms with what had happened, and began to reenact Jesus’ ”last supper,” they formulated these enormously powerful words. In any case, Jewish tradition suggested a wealth of associations with sacrifice that Paul, Mark, Matthew, and Luke incorporated into various versions of the story.50 In the process, as we have seen, the sacred meal took on not a single meaning but clusters of meanings that became increasingly rich and complex. Justin tells us what second-century Christians actually did, in various groups he visited as he traveled from Asia Minor to Rome (c. 150 C.E.):

  All those who live in the city or the country gather together in one place on the day of the sun, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read. . . . Then we all rise together and pray, and then . . . bread and wine and water are brought51 to be shared as Jesus commanded. Christians to this day, including those who do not center their worship on communion, know that how they interpret Jesus’ death—whether as sacrifice, and what kind of sacrifice—has much to do with how they understand their faith.

  Seen as sacrifice, the meal could suggest not only forgiveness and a new relationship with God but also, like Passover, divine deliverance. Thus Paul recalls how the Passover lamb was slaughtered before the feast and invites his hearers to “the Lord’s supper,” proclaiming that “Christ, our Passover [lamb], has been sacrificed for us; therefore, let us celebrate the feast.”52 Mark actually writes the Passover feast into the narrative, declaring that Jesus’ last supper with his disciples was a Passover feast—one that Jesus had carefully, even miraculously, directed his disciples to prepare.53 Luke and Matthew each expand Mark’s version of the story, Luke adding that after the disciples prepared the Passover, when the time came, he sat at table, and his apostles with him, and he said to them, “With [great] desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, no longer shall I eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”54

  According to Luke and Paul, Jesus not only blessed the bread and wine but also told his followers to “do this in remembrance of me.”55 Thus they imply that, just as Passover recalls how God delivered Israel through Moses, so those who celebrate this Passover are to recall simultaneously how God is now delivering his people through Jesus.

  The author of the Gospel of John gives a different chronology for Jesus’ last days, though John, as much as—or even more than—Paul and Luke, nevertheless intends to connect Jesus’ death with Passover. However, John writes that “before the feast of Passover”56 Jesus shared a meal with his disciples for the last time, a meal that obviously could not have celebrated Passover. John says that, at that final meal, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet—an act which millions of Christians, from Roman Catholic and Orthodox to Baptist or Mormon—have turned into another sacrament. But John does not tell the story of the last supper that, from the accounts of Paul, Mark, Luke, and Matthew, has shaped Christian worship ever since. Instead, John says that Jesus was arrested on the previous night—Thursday—and brought to trial the following morning.

  Because John believed that Jesus became the Passover lamb, he says that at “about noon, on the day of preparing the Passover”57—Friday, the time prescribed for preparing the Passover lamb—Jesus was sentenced to death, tortured, and crucified. Every detail of John’s version of Jesus’ death dramatizes his conviction that Jesus himself became the sacrificial lamb.58 Thus, to show that Jesus, like the sacrificial Passover lamb, actually died before sunset on the evening of the first day of Passover, John says that a Roman soldier thrust a spear into Jesus’ side to make sure that he was dead. At that moment, John says, “out of his side came blood and water,”59 a physiological observation which also shows how Jesus’ sacrifice provides the wine mixed with water that his followers would ritually drink as “his blood.”60 John adds that when the soldiers saw that Jesus was dead, they refrained from breaking his legs, and then he quotes from Exodus that, when preparing the Passover lamb, “you shall not break a bone of [it].”61 For John, these instructions have become prophecies; thus, he declares, “not a single bone of [Jesus’] body was broken.”62

  Although John omits the story of the last supper itself, he does say that Jesus told his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood—a suggestion that, he says, offended “the Jews,” including many of Jesus’ own disciples:

  Jesus said, “I am the living bread which comes down from heaven . . . whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

  The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

  So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. . . . For my flesh is truly food, and my blood is truly drink.”

  Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”63

  Yet despite th
e weirdness of such images—and perhaps because of it—every version of this last supper in the New Testament, whether by Paul, Mark, Matthew, or Luke, interprets it as a kind of death-feast, but one that looks forward in hope. So Paul declares that “whenever you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death, until he comes.”64

  Many Christians preferred these powerful images, apparently, to the more innocuous interpretation found, for example, in Didache; for later generations chose to include in the New Testament the versions of the story that tell of eating flesh and drinking blood, dying and coming back to life. Yet during the centuries in which crucifixion remained an immediate and hideous threat, Jesus’ followers did not paint a cross—much less a crucifix—on the walls of the catacombs in Rome as a symbol of hope. Instead, they depicted Jesus as one who, delivered from destruction, now delivers others: like Daniel freed from the lions’ den, Jonah released from the belly of the whale, or Lazarus, his shroud unwinding, walking out of his grave. The Apocalypse of Peter, one of the so-called gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, goes further, depicting Jesus “glad and laughing on the cross,”65 a radiant being of light; and, as we shall see, the Acts of John, another “heretical” source, depicts Jesus celebrating the eucharist by leading his disciples as they chant and dance together a mystical hymn, the “Round Dance of the Cross.”66