Not, of course, that to plug one was necessarily a simple task. Those who lived in the Fertile Crescent could appreciate this better than most. The line that separated the empires of Persia and Rome did not, after all, follow the course of a natural barrier. Instead, it wound across featureless landscape, and divided peoples who more properly belonged together. Only with muscle, and resolve, and ceaseless effort could such a boundary possibly hope to be maintained. That Edessa, which in AD 216 had been formally annexed by Rome, would still remain, three centuries on, a possession of the Roman Empire, bore witness enough to the ability of the Caesars to hold a line.85 Though Kavad, in 503, would put the city under siege, Edessa would not, unlike Amida, fall. Justinian’s great building programme at Dara, a hundred miles to the east, would serve only to hammer home the point. It took might to maintain a border. Might such as only the master of a mighty empire could command.
Two centuries and more before the time of Justinian, however, neither rabbi nor bishop wielded any such power. Great though the moral authority of both had become among the communities which they claimed to lead, it certainly did not extend to the building of watchtowers, to the manning of a frontier. Jews and Christians, though conscious of themselves as peoples with distinct identities, remained unclear where precisely the border between them lay. Jewish Christians and Christian Jews could still mill across it pretty much as they pleased.
Only a man who could lend to the rabbis or the bishops the full awesome power of a Shahanshah, or perhaps a Caesar, could hope to alter that.
But such a prospect, in AD 300, seemed scarcely imaginable.
Forging a New Heaven
To the rabbis, the notion that a Gentile king might end up a Jew was not inherently a ludicrous one. Nero himself, so it was confidently asserted in the Talmud, had been brought to repent of all his viciousness and become a proselyte. Even more startlingly, one of his descendants was supposed to have been a rabbi—and a particularly celebrated one at that.86 The inherent implausibility of all this did not bother the rabbis themselves a jot. Rather, it served, in their opinion, only to render the miracle of Nero’s conversion the more astounding and edifying. After all, if even a notorious Caesar could be brought to follow the Torah, then who was to say what powerful Gentiles might become proselytes in the future?
Christians too, when they surveyed the kingdoms of the world, lived in hope. Memories of how Jesus had communicated with the King of Edessa were cherished precisely because they seemed to suggest that even great monarchs might be touched by the Holy Spirit. Clinching proof of this arrived in AD 301, when a Parthian king named Tiridates III, lord of the ruggedly mountainous and inaccessible land of Armenia, midway between the Roman and Persian empires, accepted Christ as his lord. Not only that, but he promptly ordered his subjects to follow suit. Since the Armenians had hitherto been devout worshippers of Mihr, this raised a good few eyebrows across Iranshahr, where the Zoroastrian priesthood, ever suspicious of interlopers, had already marked down the “Krestayne” as purveyors of witchcraft. There was, however, in this accusation, more than a hint of a grudging compliment. Not even their bitterest enemies could deny the Christians a quite spectacular success rate when it came to healing the sick. Rabbis, fully alert to what they regarded as the sinister potency of Christ’s name, urged invalids to guard against it, no matter what. The salutary tale was told of one rabbi who discovered, heartbreakingly, that his dying grandson had been restored to health by a magician’s whispering of the name of Jesus over the sickbed—and thereby been denied any prospect of eternal life.87 Christians themselves, of course, furiously rejected any suggestion that their powers of healing might owe anything to necromancy. Rather, the ability of their holy men and women to work miracles, to cast out malevolent spirits and even to defy the laws of nature, was due, in their devout opinion, to the precise opposite: a power derived from heaven. The quite unanticipated acquisition of their first royal convert powerfully confirmed them in this view: for Tiridates had been brought to baptism after being cured of possession by demons. Only the name of Christ had been able to work the exorcism. Only the name of Christ had been able to convince the king that he was not, in fact, a wild boar. No wonder, then, knowing this, that Christians should eagerly have scanned the Shahanshah too for signs of lunacy, or any other ailment, and dared to dream.
Yet the challenge they faced remained a fearsome one. Not even the most proficient exorcist among them could doubt the menace and malignancy of their adversaries. Spirits flung down from heaven at the beginning of time still stalked the earth, hunting human prey; nor had Christ’s triumph over them on the cross wholly broken their grip on the empires of the world. The Persians, in their ignorance and folly, still worshipped fire; while in the teeming cities of the Romans, there was barely a square that did not stand filthy with the smoke of sacrifices paid to idols, and with the perfumes of incense burned in their honour. Christians did not deny that idols, images such as the Palladium, might be possessed of an authentically supernatural power; nor did they doubt that the spirits worshipped as gods by idolators truly existed. But to honour them, no matter how ancient the rites might be and no matter how passionately the Roman people might believe them essential to the maintenance of their empire, was akin to feeding the blood-lust of a vampire. An idol might be the loveliest in the world—and yet how did all its beauty serve it, if not as paint on the scabs of a whore?
Paul himself, arriving in Ephesus, a wealthy city on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, had risked a lynching to press home the point: that “gods made with hands are not gods.”88 A bold thesis to push in Ephesus, of all places: for there stood in the city a temple so beautiful that it ranked as one of the seven wonders of the world. Artemis, the goddess enthroned amid its dazzling gold and marble, was a deity no less virginal or powerful than Pallas Athena—but Paul had been nothing daunted. True to form, he had refused point blank, even in the shadow of one of the holiest places in the entire empire, to make allowances for the sensitivities of those who worshipped there, or to compromise in the slightest with their convictions. As a result, not surprisingly, he had provoked a riot and almost been torn to pieces. A few years later, his continued refusal to renounce Christ had resulted in his execution by Nero in Rome.89Peter, and many other apostles, had perished in the same wave of judicial murders. Thereafter, over succeeding generations, many other Christians, prosecuted by the imperial authorities for insulting the gods who had supposedly made Rome great, had likewise opted to pay the ultimate price—and joyously so. After all, by doing so, they could share in the suffering of their Saviour. To be baptised anew in one’s own blood was to be cleansed of every last taint of sin. The souls of those who died for Christ, ascending from the reek and shambles of the killing ground, were assured of eternal life. Nor was that the limit of their rewards—for the more spectacular their sufferings, so the more did they draw attention to the glory of Christ and His earthly Church. Each one perished as a “witness”—martyr, in Greek.