In the city of the Hebrews,
In the city of the prophets,
In the city thought of as just.
And who has been murdered?
And who is the murderer?
I am ashamed to give the answer,
But give it I must. . . .
The one who hung the earth in space is himself hanged;
The one who fixed the heavens in place, is himself impaled;
The one who firmly fixed all things, is himself firmly fixed to the tree.
The Lord is insulted,
God has been murdered,
The King of Israel has been destroyed
By the right hand of Israel.2
It is, of course, one thing for a member of a relatively small persecuted minority that is politically powerless to attack others with such vitriolic rhetoric. But what happens when the persecuted minority comes to be a majority? What happens when it gains political power—in fact, supreme political power? What happens when the emperor of Rome himself comes to believe the Christian message? As you can imagine, what happens will not be good for the enemies who supposedly murdered the God the Christians worship.
In a book that has deservedly become a classic study of the rise of anti-Judaism in the early church, called Faith and Fratricide, theologian Rosemary Ruether sets forth the social implications of Christian power in the fourth century for Jews of the empire.3 The short story is that Jews came to be legally marginalized under Christian emperors and treated as second-class citizens with restricted legal rights and limited economic possibilities. Jewish beliefs and practices were not actually made illegal, in the way pagan sacrifices were at the end of the fourth century, but theologians and Christian bishops—who now were increasingly powerful not only as religious leaders, but also as civil authorities—railed against Jews and attacked them as the enemies of God. State legislation was passed to constrain the activities of Jews.
Constantine himself passed a law that forbade Jews from owning Christian slaves. This may seem like a humane measure in our day and age, when slavery of all kinds is viewed with disgust and contempt. But Constantine did not ban slavery and was not opposed to it. On the contrary, the Roman world continued to work as a slave economy. Without slaves one could not run any serious manufacturing or agricultural business. But if the population became increasingly Christian, and Jews could have only Jewish and pagan slaves, then any chance for Jews to compete economically with Christians was curtailed.
Eventually it became illegal for a Christian to convert to Judaism. Under the emperor Theodotius I, near the end of the fourth century, it became illegal for a Christian to marry a Jew. Doing so was considered an act of adultery. Jews came to be excluded from serving in public office. In 423 CE a law was passed that made it illegal for Jews to build or even repair a synagogue. Accompanying all these forms of legislation were acts of violence against Jews that, even if not sponsored by the emperor or other state authorities, were tacitly condoned. Synagogues were burned, lands were confiscated, Jews were persecuted and even murdered—and the authorities turned a blind eye. Why not? These were the people who had killed God.
A key example illustrates the situation. In 388 CE the bishop of a town called Callinicum incited his Christian parishioners to assault the local Jewish synagogue. They did so, leveling it to the ground. When the Jewish population in town protested to the emperor Theodosius, he ordered the bishop to have the synagogue rebuilt with church money. At that point, a powerful Christian leader interposed to try to reverse the emperor’s judgment. One of the most influential bishops at the time was Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. When word of the emperor’s intervention and demand for reparation reached Milan, Ambrose wrote a harsh letter in protest, arguing that the emperor was in danger of offending his own religious duty by this intervention and insisting that the bishop should by no means be required to restore the synagogue.
Here we have a remarkable situation. Less than a century earlier, Christian leaders were being hunted down and persecuted by the ruling authorities. Now Christian leaders were reprimanding the emperor in writing and expecting that they would be obeyed. How the tables have turned!
Theodosius decided to ignore Ambrose’s protest, but as it happens, he made a trip to Milan and attended a worship service in the cathedral there. Ambrose claims, in his own account of the affair, that he preached a sermon directed to the emperor’s “misbehavior” and afterward, in the middle of the service, walked down from the altar to confront the emperor face-to-face, publicly demanding that the emperor back down. In this very public arena, the emperor felt he had no choice. He acceded to the bishop’s demand, the Christian mob in Callinicum went unpunished, and the synagogue remained in ruins (see Ambrose, Letters 40 and 41).4
Now, not only is Christ God, but his servants the bishops have real political power. And they are using that power in ugly ways against their longtime enemies, the Jews, those who allegedly killed their own God.
The God Christ and the Christian World
WITH THE CONVERSION OF the emperor to the belief that Christ was God and that the God of the Christians was supreme, the discourse of Christians among themselves clearly changed. Earlier arguments of Christians with Christians were over issues that came to be seen as basic and foundational. Was Christ God? Yes. Was he a human? Yes. Was he, though, just one person, not two? Yes. By the early fourth century, when Constantine converted, the vast majority of Christians agreed with those affirmations. You might think that this would put an end to the theological debates and the search for heretics in the midst of the orthodox. But the historical truth is that the debates were just starting to warm up.
I have already mentioned the fact that the Arian controversy did not die out with the Council of Nicea; it went on for another half century or more. And new debates arose, over issues that would have been unthinkable just a hundred years earlier. Theological views that developed in the wake of the conquest of orthodox understandings of Jesus as both divine and human became increasingly sophisticated and nuanced. What earlier had been acceptable positions among the orthodox came to be challenged in their minutest details. The issues may seem picayune to outside observers, but to insiders they were matters of real moment, with eternal consequences. As a result, the vitriol did not lessen now that the “major” issues had been resolved. If anything, the rhetoric was significantly ratcheted up, and error on even the smallest point became a matter of enormous importance—the stuff of excommunication and exile.
I will not try to provide even a cursory treatment of the various theological controversies of the fourth, fifth, and later centuries, but instead will give the slightest taste, by briefly describing three views that came to be articulated, debated, and eventually denounced as heretical.5 This quick overview will at least give an idea of the level of argumentation carried on between Christian and Christian.
Marcellus of Ancyra
One of the major proponents of the Athanasian, anti-Arian views adopted at the Council of Nicea was the bishop of Ancyra, named Marcellus (died 374 CE). He saw himself as hyperorthodox. But he realized that the decisions leading to the creed of Nicea left considerable room for development, especially on the question of how Christ—who was coeternal and equal with God—actually related to the Father. Were Christ and the Father two separate but equal beings, or hypostases (a term that now meant something like “person” or “individual entity”)? Marcellus fully realized that a modalist view could no longer be accepted. But was there some way to preserve the oneness, the unity, of the godhead without falling into the trap of Sabellius and others like him, so that no one could charge the Christians of having more than one God?