Which, as mission statements went, could certainly not be faulted for any lack of chutzpah. Paul’s ambitions were quite as ground-breaking as they were global. Cults, and the divinities they celebrated, had hitherto invariably been locaclass="underline" attached to specific places, attached to particular peoples. Any suggestion that they might be something more, that they might be universal, was liable to strike most people as either offensive, or ludicrous, or both. Nevertheless, Paul had indeed breathed in something of the authentic spirit of the age. Enthusiasm for a brotherhood of man was increasingly in the air. Posidonius, after all, a whole century before Paul, had trusted that it would emerge as one of the fruits of Roman rule. Why, then, in a world dominated by the pretensions of would-be universal empires, should the pretensions of a would-be universal faith not find a ready audience? Sure enough, in the decades and centuries following Jesus’ crucifixion, the Christian mission to the Gentiles began to thrive. Cells planted in the time of Paul steadily renewed and replicated themselves. Across lands ruled from Ctesiphon, across lands ruled from Rome, they grew, and flourished, and spread. In each one, men and women from every conceivable background, class and race would meet as equals, in a shared room, before the gaze of a severe but loving God. Equals, because all of them—the senator no less than the kitchen-maid, the Greek no less than the Briton, the philosopher no less than the whore—might be sucked down into the glutinous bog of sin; equals, because all of them, thanks to the death of Christ upon the cross, had been rendered capable of winning salvation for themselves. Never before had there been preached a message of personal responsibility quite so radical, so democratic, or so potentially wide-reaching in its appeal. Christian thinkers, in their struggle to define the principles of their faith, were engaged in a project no less well-suited to the times for being so palpably quixotic: the fathoming of the purposes of God in an ever more globalised world.
In this respect, of course, they were not so far different from the rabbis of Mesopotamia. Their methods were similar, too: for Christian sages also drew for their ultimate inspiration upon the inheritance of Jewish scripture. However, whereas the rabbis identified the Torah as something ageless and unchanging, Gentile Christians viewed it—and the Tanakh generally—merely as an “Old Testament”: a cloud-dimmed glimpse of the Eternal Light that was Jesus Christ. This perspective, of course, begged an obvious question: what should a “New Testament” be?52 Already, in the century that followed Christ’s crucifixion, scholars had begun to compile collections of writings that could provide an answer. Paul’s letters were the first to be anthologised, and then various euangelia, or “gospels”—biographies of Christ. Just like the rabbis of Sura and Pumpedita, the Christians who compiled these texts believed that it had been given to them to meditate upon the single most earth-shattering event in human history: an intrusion of the divine into the fallen world so cosmic in its implications that the entire order of the universe revolved around it. The surest fruit of this intrusion, however, was not a body of law, as the rabbis believed, but rather the knowledge in the soul of an individual believer that Jesus was truly the Lord. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” So Christ, according to one of the gospels, had declared. “No one comes to the Father, but by me.”53
A ringing statement—but ambiguous all the same. It was given to few Christians to claim, as Paul himself had done, a personal vision of the risen Christ. How, then, in the absence of such direct communications, were the faithful to know what, precisely, “the way” might be? Jesus himself, when commanding his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” had instructed them to do so “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”54 Here, however, was only further ambiguity—for who, or what, was “the Holy Spirit”? The answer to this question, one that many generations of Christian sages would labour at providing, did not come easily: for it touched upon the ineffable mystery that was the identity of God Himself. How fortunate it was, then, for the less intellectually inclined among the faithful, that the Holy Spirit might be experienced without necessarily being comprehended. Whether imagined as a dove, or as fire, or as a sound “from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind,”55 it was, so Christians believed, the very breath of the divine upon the world. Whenever they felt themselves moved by the rapture of faith, a flickering-like ecstasy about their souls, then they could know themselves possessed by the Spirit. Not, however, that the evidence of its workings was confined to their inner lives. The Spirit was to be traced as well in the unity that it brought to the Christian people everywhere. No matter where these men and women might live, no matter what their status, they had all shared a single ceremony of initiation: an immersion in water that they termed “baptism.” “For by one Spirit we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.”56 Without it, there could be no unity, no shared Ecclesia—no Church.
Which meant in turn that Christians everywhere could throw themselves into the business of constructing a globe-spanning bureaucracy and feel that they were thereby serving the purposes of their Lord. A relish for firing off letters was yet another way in which Paul had blazed a trail. Long-distance communications were cherished by the faithful throughout the Roman and the Iranian worlds as the lifeblood of the Church. The most trivial, as well as the most transcendent, topics were vigorously debated by Christians across the entire sweep of the rival empires. Not even a Caesar, not even a Shahanshah, could boast a perspective to match. Christians, well aware of this, positively gloried in the fact: “Any country can be their homeland—and yet their homeland, wheresoever it may be, is to them a foreign place.”57 There seemed no limit to the expanding scope of their identity.
Yet it was not only by thinking on a global scale that the Christian Church had succeeded in fashioning itself, over the course of barely a few centuries, into the most formidable non-governmental organisation that the world had ever seen. It operated locally as well. Little more than a generation after Jesus’s crucifixion, Christians had already grown obsessed with the need for disciplined book-keeping. The paperwork of each individual church had duly been entrusted to an official chosen by the local congregation to serve as an “overseer,” or “episcopos”: a “bishop.” Soon enough, however, and these same bureaucrats had begun soaringly to outgrow their origins as mere functionaries. Three centuries on, and it had become the entitlement of a bishop to rule almost as a monarch over the congregation that selected him. He it was who would act as spokesman for local Christians in their dealings with the broader Church; move to resolve their problems and defend them in times of crisis; define for them their beliefs, and prescribe for them the texts they should read, and answer for them before God. “It is manifest that we should look upon the bishop even as we would look upon the Lord Himself—standing, as he does, before the Lord.”58