The revolutionary implications of this message, to those who heard it, could not help but raise pressing questions. In the cramped workshops that provided the Hagioi of Rome with their places of assembly, where they would meet to commemorate the arrest and suffering of Christ with a communal meal, men rubbed shoulders with women, citizens with slaves. If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended? Paul, in giving his answer, betrayed a certain ambivalence. Certainly, he refuted any notion that the divine justice promised to those baptised in the name of Christ might be determined by their rank. ‘God,’ he declared firmly, ‘does not show favouritism.’55 All were equally redeemed from the servitude of sin and death. The master of a household was no more or less a son of God than his slaves. Everyone, then, should be joined together by a common love. Yet even as Paul urged this, he did not push the radicalism of his message to its logical conclusion. A slave might be loved by his master as a brother, and renowned for his holiness, and blessed with the gift of prophecy – but still remain a slave. ‘We have different gifts,’ so Paul explained, ‘according to the grace given us. If a man’s gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith. If it is serving, let him serve.’ And if he combined the gifts, then, of course, let him do both.
Paul, in urging this manifesto, could at least argue that he practised what he preached. Willingly, he had abandoned the privileges of his upbringing. Not just a scribe and a scholar, he had inherited from his father – if Luke’s history is to be trusted – the rights of a Roman citizen.* He rarely stood upon them, though. Fearless in proclaiming what he believed, he perfectly accepted that those placed in authority were entitled to punish him for what he said. Repeatedly, rather than abandon his right to speak in synagogues, he submitted to their codes of discipline. ‘Five times have I received at the hands of the Jews the thirty-nine lashes.’56 In a similar spirit, and despite his scorn for the pretensions of the Caesars, Paul warned the churches of Rome not to offer open resistance to Nero. ‘Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.’57 Paul’s conviction that the only true citizenship was that of heaven was matched by his determination to exploit the manifestations of earthly authority as effectively as he possibly could. If synagogues offered him a chance to win his fellow Jews for Christ, then he would seize it. If householders in Corinth or Rome provided him with financial backing, and with spaces in which his various converts could meet, and with funds to help relieve a famine back in Judaea, then he would take full advantage of their generosity. If Roman power upheld the peace that enabled him to travel the world, then he would not jeopardise his mission by urging his converts to rebel against it. Too much was at stake. There was no time to weave the entire fabric of society anew. What mattered, in the brief window of opportunity that Paul had been granted, was to establish as many churches as possible – and thereby to prepare the world for the parou-sia. ‘For the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.’58
And increasingly, it seemed that the world’s foundations were indeed starting to shake. In the summer of 64, a few weeks after Nero’s notorious street party, a deadly fire broke out in Rome. For days it raged. When at last it was extinguished, perhaps a third of the city was left as smoking rubble. Nero, looking around for culprits, fixed on the Hagioi. The charges against them – arson, and ‘hatred of humankind’59 – betrayed no detailed interrogation of their beliefs. They were scapegoats, nothing more. Nero, ever fond of a spectacle, displayed a vengefulness worthy of Artemis and Apollo. Some of the condemned, dressed in animal skins, were torn to pieces by dogs. Others, lashed to crosses, were smeared in pitch and used as torches to illumine the night. Nero, riding in his chariot, mingled with the gawping crowds. Among those put to death, so later tradition would record, were two famous names. One was Peter. The other – beheaded, as befitted a Roman citizen – was Paul. Whether, in truth, he perished in the wake of the great fire, or some time before, is unclear; but that he was indeed executed seems certain enough. Within thirty years of his death, he was being hailed in Rome as the very archetype of a witness to the glory of God: as a martus, a ‘martyr’. ‘For after he had been bound in chains seven times, driven into exile and stoned; after he had preached in both the East and the West; after he had taught what it was to be righteous to the whole world, even to the furthest limits of the West; then he won the noble glory that was the reward for his faith.’60
Paul died disappointed in his hope that he would live to see the return in glory of Christ. Yet the most revolutionary of all his teachings – that the Lord of Hosts, rather than preparing amid fire and thunder to rescue Israel from foreign oppression, had opted instead to send His Son to perish on a Roman cross, and thereby to usher in a new age – was soon to receive what, to his followers, could only seem awful confirmation. In ad 66, the smouldering resentments of the Jews in Judaea burst into open revolt. Roman vengeance, when it came, was terrible. Four years after the launch of the rebellion, Jerusalem was stormed by the legions. The wealth of the Temple was carted off to Rome, and the building itself burnt to the ground. ‘Neither its antiquity, nor the extent of its treasures, nor the global range of those who regarded it as theirs, nor the incomparable glory of its rites, proved sufficient to prevent its destruction.’61 God, whose support the rebels had been banking upon, had failed to save his people. Many Jews, cast into an abyss of misery and despair, abandoned their faith in him altogether. Others, rather than blame God, chose instead to blame themselves, arraigning themselves on a charge of disobedience, and turning with a renewed intensity to the study of their scriptures and their laws. Others yet – those who believed that Jesus was Christ, and whom the Roman authorities had increasingly begun to categorise as Christiani* – found in the ruin visited on God’s Chosen People the echo of an even more dreadful spectacle: that of God’s Son upon the gallows. Paul, although he had not lived to see the destruction of the Temple, had been expecting it. The conviction that God was a warrior bound by a timeless covenant to the defence of a particular people was one that he had abandoned after his first vision of Christ. It was a new covenant that he had preached. The Son of God, by becoming mortal, had redeemed all humanity. Not as a leader of armies, not as the conqueror of Caesars, but as a victim the Messiah had come. The message was as novel as it was shocking – and was to prove well suited to an age of trauma. ‘Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom – but we preach Christ crucified.’62
It was hardly surprising, then, in the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction, and with Jesus starting to pass out of living memory, that Christians should have set to transcribing reports of his life and sayings. Paul, in his letters, had often made allusion to the passion of Christ – to the night of his arrest, to his flogging, to his crucifixion – but, confident that his correspondents already knew the details, had neglected to make it the focus of his communications. The gospels written in the tense and terrible years that immediately preceded and followed the annihilation of Jerusalem were different.† The four earliest and most influential all had as their climax the death and resurrection of Christ. But these were not their only theme. ‘You have one teacher.’63 So Jesus, in one of the gospels, declared. His manner of teaching, though, was nothing like that of a philosopher. Those who paraded their virtue, and condemned the faults of others, he dismissed as painted tombs heaving with maggots and corruption. The standards of virtue he preached – to love one’s enemy, to abandon all one’s worldly goods – were so demanding as to seem impossible to meet. He was peculiarly tender with sinners. He dined with Jews who violated the law and talked beside wells with adulterers. He had a genius for simile. The kingdom of God was like a mustard seed; it was like the world as seen through the eyes of a child; it was like yeast in dough. Again and again, in the stories that Jesus loved to tell, in his parables, the plot was as likely to be drawn from the world of the humble as it was from that of the wealthy or the wise: from the world of swineherds, servants, sowers. And yet, for all that, they had an eerie quality. Repeatedly, the familiar was rendered strange. Seed falling among thorns; a lost sheep; bridesmaids waiting for a wedding to start: all, in Jesus’ teaching, shed a haunting light on the purposes of God. Yet nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever before been portrayed in literature. The measure of this was that Christians, when they read the gospels, were able to believe that the man whose life they depicted, a man whom they described as weeping, sweating and bleeding, a man whose death they vividly and unsparingly related, had indeed been what Paul claimed him to be: ‘the Son of God’.64