Six and a half centuries before the Roman sack of Jerusalem, when the Babylonians had visited a similar fate on the city, those hauled away into captivity had kept faith with their god by imagining that all would ultimately be for the best. Israel would be restored, and princes bow down before her. The darkness would ultimately be lifted. So the Lord God himself had declared.
‘I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’65
Now, in the wake of a second Temple’s destruction, the darkness seemed only to have thickened. What prospect, then, of light? To this question, the writers of the gospels provided a startling answer: it had already appeared. ‘The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.’66 So began a gospel which Christians in due course would attribute to John, youngest of the twelve original disciples of Jesus, and the one whom he had particularly loved. The Logos, which was with God, and was God, and through whom the world was made, had come into the world, and the world had failed to recognise him. No less than Paul’s letters, it was – in its fusion of Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy – a recognisable monument to the age. Certainly, the notion that light and truth were synonymous was not original to John. It reached back at least to Darius. Yet what followed had no parallel in the utterances of Persian kings, nor of Greek philosophers, nor of Jewish prophets. The Logos – the Word – had become flesh. His disciples had been fishermen and tax-collectors. They had trodden dusty roads together, and slept on hard floors. Then, when the night came of Jesus’ arrest, they had abandoned him. Even Peter, standing by a fire in a courtyard outside where Jesus had been taken, had three times denied him before cockcrow. The betrayal had seemed beyond forgiveness. But then, at the end of the gospel, it had come. John described how the risen Christ had appeared to the disciples as they were out on a lake fishing, and had lit a fire, and had invited them to cook their fish on it. Then, when they had finished eating, he had turned to Peter, and three times asked him, ‘Do you love me?’ Three times Peter had answered that he did. And three times Jesus had commanded him, ‘Feed my sheep.’67
So ended a gospel that had begun with the Word that was with God, and was God, at the moment of creation: beside a barbecue on the shores of a lake. Hope from despair; reconciliation from betrayal; healing from trauma.
It was a message, amid the convulsions of the age, to which many would find themselves drawn – and for which some, as time would prove, were more than willing to die.
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* ‘He brings war to an end; he orders peace; by manifesting himself, he surpasses the hopes of all who were looking for good news.’ This inscription, written in 29 BC, was recorded on a stone slab in the city of Priene, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. It uses the plural form of euangelion – euangelia.
* Even if Luke is not to be trusted – and scholarly opinion is divided on the question of whether Paul was truly a Roman citizen – the fact that the claim could be made implies much about his background.
* According to Acts, ‘the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch’ (11.26). The implication of this statement, combined with the distinctive form of the Greek word Christianos, strongly suggests that ‘it was first coined in Latin, in the sphere of Roman administration’ (Horrell, p. 364). Indeed, Tacitus explicitly states that those condemned by Nero were abusively referred to by the name of Chrestiani. Unsurprisingly, then, neither in Paul’s letters nor in the gospels does the word appear; but already, by ad 100 at the latest, Christians themselves seem to have begun to appropriate it.
† The four canonical gospels continue to defy precise dating. Estimates range from the 50s to the 90s. The evidence for a later date is no longer as solid as it was once thought to be.
IV
BELIEF
AD
177: L
YON
The churches of the Rhône valley were on the rack. News of their agonies could not help but shadow Irenaeus as he set out on his journey. Some years previously, travelling from his native Asia Minor, he had settled in Vienne, a city twenty miles south of Lyon. The Gauls – like their distant cousins the Galatians – had long since submitted to Roman arms. Vienne had originally been founded by Julius Caesar, while Lyon had been serving as the effective capital of Gaul since the time of Augustus. Irenaeus, arriving in the Rhône valley from the Aegean, had found a home away from home. Lyon in particular was proudly cosmopolitan. It possessed a temple complex dedicated to Augustus quite as impressive as anything to be seen in Asia Minor; it teemed with officers, administrators and merchants drawn from across the Roman world; it even had an altar to Cybele. Most significantly, from Irenaeus’ point of view, there were Christians. Their companionship had always provided him with the bedrock of his life. As a young man, he had sat at the feet of the local bishop, ‘a steadfast witness of truth’1 by the name of Polycarp – and who, so Irenaeus reported, had in his turn known the gospel-writer John. ‘And I remember how he spoke of his conversations with John and with others who had seen the Lord, how he would recite their words from memory, and recall what he had heard from them concerning the Lord, his mighty works, and his teaching.’2 Arriving in the Rhône valley, Irenaeus had brought with him something incalculably precious to the infant churches there: reminiscences, derived from a celebrated witness, of the generation of the apostles. The church in Vienne had welcomed him with open arms. His learning and his palpable commitment to Christ set the seal on his reputation. This was why, anxious to settle various disagreements that had arisen among the churches of the Rhône valley, and eager to consult with those of Rome, the elders of Lyon and Vienne had chosen Irenaeus as their ambassador to the capital. And so off he had set.