The First Christians / pt. 3
The tradition dates Jesus of Nazareth’s birth to about 4 BCE. That was a full sixty years after the death of Yeshu haNotsri, whose given name was apparently Yochanan ben Abshalom in Hebrew, that is, John the son of Absalom. As we have seen, this prophet was a member of the Hasmonean royal family. Two of his uncles were kings (Aristobulus I and Janneus), his grandfather was John Hyrcanus I (r. 134–104), his own sister was married to Judas Aristobulus II—the king during whose reign John was executed—and his maternal uncle was none other than Joshua ben Perachiah, the head of the Sanhedrin (nasi) and the most powerful religious figure in the land.
Despite all these astonishing and powerful connections, according to Talmudic records John/Yeshu renounced all and became an outcast, preached “another way,” and was ultimately caught and executed by the Sanhedrin, an elite assembly for which he himself had once been destined.
Within a year or two of John’s death the Romans conquered Israel (63 BCE) and brought an end to the Hasmonean Kingdom. They installed a puppet regime (Hyrcanus II as High Priest but not king) and divided the province into five autonomous regions. Thus began the centuries-long Roman rule of the land. In this, now Roman environment, the earliest Christian fellowship took root.
Accordingly, we must regard the decades after the execution of John about 64 BCE as the much-sought-after decades of “the first Christians.” This is about a century earlier than the standard estimation, which erroneously dates the first Christians to the time of “Paul” in mid-I CE.
The theology of these first Christians can be gleaned from texts outside the New Testament. We will look at those texts in upcoming posts. They are centered around the transformative ascent to divinity—a “resurrection” available to every person. This ascent was modeled on the teachings (and life) of the prophet John himself, symbolized and enacted in baptism, where the proselyte dips into gnosis (water) and emerges transformed, having exchanged the linen garment (sindon in the NT) of the acolyte for the royal robe (stolé). Thus, the transformative event in the Christian’s life was spiritual baptism, resurrection, and marriage all rolled into one.
The saving gnosis was called simply “Savior” in Hebrew—Yeshua, or “Jesus” in translation. For the first Christians, the beloved, saving Jesus was the groom, and the proselyte was the bride. The spiritual Jesus united with the righteous person at baptism/resurrection/marriage. This is the Jesus of the text known as Secret Mark, a text in which the beloved Jesus lies with the proselyte at night. In short, we are dealing with a rich symbolic language, an encratite language developed by the early Christians—a sort of in-group code replete with nuptial symbolism including bridegroom, bride, wedding garment (linen or robe), and so on. This symbolism, of course, would mislead outsiders—including the later Church Fathers, who were only too happy to label these “heretics” as libertines.
Thus, John the son of Absalom was early dubbed John the Baptizer, for his teaching “baptized” others—that is, it had the power to transform them through gnosis. Inevitably, the prophet also soon became known by the saving teaching with which he was ineluctably associated, Yeshu, “Savior.” And, finally, the moniker haNotsri was attached to him—that is, “the Natsarene”—which roughly means “Keeper/Guardian/Revealer of Secret Traditions.” In this way, and probably by the turn of the era, the prophet was ennobled under a cavalcade of honorifics, and he became known as Yeshu ha-Notsri, “The Savior, Revealer of Secret Traditions.” His real name, Yochanan ben Abshalom, was suppressed, and this for theological reasons. For, just as the prophet had renounced power, status and wealth, so his followers were faithful to his example and ignored his royal pedigree. Later Christian heresy-hunters denominated these early Christians ebionites (< Heb. ’bion, “poor”), for one of their central teachings was the evil inherent in worldly power and riches.
According to their own conception of the prophet, the early followers called themselves Natsarenes, “Keepers of Secret Traditions” and saw themselves as heirs to hidden traditions going far back in history, marginal non-Mosaic traditions that had been associated with Enoch (who went to heaven and there learned the divine secrets) and with Seth. Epiphanius called these early Christians Nasarenes (with sigma, Panarion 18). The Church Father reports that they “would not accept the Pentateuch itself” and were “before Christ and did not know Christ” (Pan 29.6.1). This is our first intimation that the ebionites and the Nasarenes were identical. From Epiphanius’ fourth-century point of view, “before Christ” meant “before Jesus of Nazareth,” that is, before the turn of the era—which perfectly fits the first century BCE that we are now considering. And Epiphanius was correct: the Nasarenes were before Christ/Jesus of Nazareth.
We can expect that the first Christian writings—memories of John the Baptizer/Yeshu and initial reactions to his ministry—were written in the decades following the prophet’s shocking death in the late 60s BCE. John/Yeshu may himself have written down some things (Samaritan records suggest that he in fact did so). After all, he was a highly educated man. To my knowledge, however, no writings by the prophet survive—unless some managed to enter the library of the Dead Sea Sect. (I am referring to the Thanksgiving Psalms, Heb. Hodayoth, whose “intensely personal tone… stands in sharp contrast to that of the rest of the scrolls.”
The religious writings that do survive from the later decades BCE and the first decades CE are today termed “intertestamentary literature” and generally fall into the category of the Jewish pseudepigrapha (“false writings”). The standard resource for this literature is edited by J. Charlesworth in two thick volumes, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. This large body of works contains “legends, wisdom and philosophical literature, prayers, psalms, and odes, fragments of lost Judeo-Hellenistic works” (according to the inside cover). With one exception, these lesser-known texts were, for one reason or another, not admitted into the canon as scripture. The exception is 1 Enoch, which has always enjoyed canonical status in Ethiopia.
Understandably, the attention given to the Jewish pseudepigrapha is small compared to the attention accorded the Torah (Pentateuch), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings)—the three branches of Jewish scripture totaling 39 books. For scholars, the pseudepigrapha have been like brass compared to the gold of the Jewish canon. However, when we look at the pseudepigrapha with new eyes, as it were, this body of neglected literature becomes a treasure trove. The “brass” turns to gold, for the Jewish pseudepigrapha includes works by the first Christians, followers of Yeshu who considered themselves separatist Jews, who wrote in Hebrew and Aramaic, and who couched their new religious views in the familiar language of their heritage, Judaism. Those views were revolutionary, and they were taken up neither by Judaism nor by what was to become normative Christianity. I submit that here, in obscure texts now catalogued in thick scholarly tomes, are writings of the Nasarenes, the first Christians. Reading those texts (with new eyes) reveals to us that they cherished gnostic ideas of ascent to the divine, voluntary poverty (ebionism), voluntary chastity (encratism)—and an enigmatic figure they called the “Son of Man.”
In the next post we will begin to explore these precious Christian works of the earliest disciples, first century BCE works that have been in plain sight for generations.