Athanasius argued at length that the Arians were wrong about Christ. In the opening of his first oration against them, he refuses them the Christian name: they are called after Arius, as the Marcionites are called after Marcion, and so they belong to their founder, not to Christ. The Arian, he says, is cloaking Judaism with the name of Christianity. The people who refused the Son are the Jews; the Arian has kept their refusal and borrowed the Son's name.
Athanasius aimed the charge of Judaism in a Christian cloak at Arius and at the bishops who defended him in the 330s and 340s, chief among them Eusebius of Nicomedia. Later Nicene writers carried the Arian name onto the Homoians, and so onto the Goths baptized by Ulfila's line, praying to Christ in Gothic, and onto the Vandals who carried the same creed into Africa. Under that name, their worship was counted as the synagogue's, and the synagogue was counted only as the place where Christ is refused, because a faith chose to refuse him.
The Judaism Jesus practiced no longer existed when Athanasius wrote. It was a religion of the Temple: sacrifice, priesthood, pilgrimage feasts in Jerusalem, and a crowd of competing parties: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, apocalyptic groups, and the followers of a Galilean teacher. When Rome burned the Temple in 70, that system ended.
The Judaism before Jesus is gone. What came after is rabbinic Judaism, a new system formed after the Temple fell in 70. The Pharisaic teachers the rabbis claimed as founders, Hillel, Shammai, Gamaliel, were active in Jesus's lifetime, and Jesus himself was addressed as rabbi. In his day the word was an honorific, "my master," given to a teacher with disciples. The ordained rabbi, authorized by recognized masters, belongs to the generations after 70, and so does the system those rabbis built: a codified Oral Torah, synagogue prayer in place of the sacrifices, and a claim to speak for all Jews. The Mishnah was redacted around 200, after the Gospels and Paul's letters. The Jerusalem Talmud followed around 400 and the Babylonian Talmud in the fifth and sixth centuries, after Nicaea. That system is the Judaism practiced today, and it does not predate Christianity.
Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are estranged cousins. They descend from different branches of Second Temple Judaism, the scribal and Pharisaic line on one side and the Jesus movement on the other, and they were formulated side by side, partly against each other. Each insisted on its own antiquity. The rabbis traced an unbroken chain to Sinai. Eusebius argued that Abraham and the patriarchs were Christians in all but name, and that the law of Moses was the interlude.
Arch of Titus, Rome
Jesus began the break. He set his own word beside the Torah's ("You have heard that it was said… but I say to you"), called himself lord of the Sabbath, and forgave sins without priest or sacrifice. In the Temple he overturned the tables of the money-changers and of the dove-sellers, who supplied the poor man's offering, and would not let anyone carry a vessel through the court (Mark 11:15–16). He quoted the clause of Isaiah 56 that calls the house a place of prayer, the side of the Temple tied to incense (Luke 1:10). The same verse promises burnt offerings on the altar; those he fulfilled in his own death. Frankincense, the heart of the Temple incense (Exodus 30:34), was the magi's gift to him at his birth (Matthew 2:11). Mark's witnesses and mockers repeat his saying that he would destroy the Temple and raise another in three days; John says the temple he meant was his body.
At the supper he took the words Moses spoke over the sacrifice at Sinai, "the blood of the covenant" (Exodus 24:8), and gave them to his own death, poured out for many. Paul was handing on that tradition in the early 50s, before Rome burned the Temple (1 Corinthians 11:23–25). Jesus is the Lamb. He died at the ninth hour, the hour of the afternoon lamb and the people's prayer (Mark 15:34–37), at the Passover, when the lambs were slaughtered (John 19:14), and Paul, before 70, calls him "our Passover lamb" (1 Corinthians 5:7). Every lamb the altar offered, daily or yearly, ends in him. Before the high priest he took Daniel's Son of Man as his own title and was condemned for blasphemy. None of this names a guilty high priest, Sadducee, or Temple officer, or a crooked money-changer. It names the house, and then his body as the house.
The traditions Jesus rejected were Pharisaic. His followers did not all finish the break at once. The Jerusalem disciples still went up to pray at the ninth hour, now the hour of his death, and Paul went up to be purified. Others never belonged to the Temple: Luke, who records those prayers, was by long tradition a Gentile. Jesus never forbade his followers the Temple. He had named his own death as the covenant sacrifice, and over the next generation they worked out what that left for the altar.
Mark 11:15–16
1 Corinthians 11:23–25
Mark 15:34
By Jesus's lifetime, Jewish writers had long spoken of a figure beside God. Philo of Alexandria, his contemporary, called the Logos a "second god." Daniel 7 gives one like a son of man everlasting dominion before the Ancient of Days. The Similitudes of Enoch enthrone a Son of Man beside the Lord of Spirits. The Aramaic Targums, fixed later but drawing on older synagogue translation, have the Memra, the Word of the Lord, act where the Hebrew has God act.
Jesus took that language for himself at his trial, and was condemned for it.
The ordained rabbis of the generations after 70 ruled that language out, and called belief in "two powers in heaven" the heresy of the minim. The Mishnah, around 200, teaches that Adam was created alone so the minim could not say there are many powers in heaven (Sanhedrin 4:5). In the Babylonian Talmud, compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries (Hagigah 15a), Elisha ben Abuya sees the angel Metatron seated in heaven and wonders whether there are two powers; Metatron is struck with sixty lashes of fire to show he is not one. The Nicenes answered the opposite way. At Nicaea in 325 the Son was declared of one substance with the Father. Neither position allowed what the Homoian creeds of 359 and 360 kept: a Son divine, begotten, and ranked beneath the Father.
The rabbis rejected a ranked divine Son as firmly as Nicaea did, and the Homoians argued from Christian texts: "The Father is greater than I" (John 14:28) and Wisdom's "The Lord created me" (Proverbs 8:22). They used those texts to deny that the Son is God as the Father is God. They kept Christ's name and shared the synagogue's refusal of him, which is exactly what Athanasius charged.
Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 15a
John 1:29
Ralph Kramden joins the Raccoons Click for color
Ralph Kramden belonged to the International Order of Friendly Sons of the Raccoons. No one at the lodge needed to claim the Elks were Raccoons gone wrong. Two lodges, two lines, each its own thing, and a man could weigh which one he wanted.
Church and synagogue are two lodges, each with its own line, and a person can weigh them and choose. The Homoian creed is a denial inside Christ's name, and whoever accepts him cannot follow it.
In 386 and 387 some Christians at Antioch were keeping the Jewish feasts. John Chrysostom, then a presbyter of the church there, answered with sermons telling them the synagogue was no place for a Christian. He had no soldiers and called for none. That is a line: a pastor telling his own people where communion is.
None of this makes the church and the synagogue equal. They make different claims, and both cannot be true: the Son is God or is not; Jesus rose or did not. A question that matters is one people must be free to weigh.
A line says who is in communion and what is confessed. A wall shuts people off. A creed that denies Christ shuts its followers off from him, and a throne that enforces that creed adds force, keeping people from leaving or punishing them for being on the other side. A line is honestly permeable: people can see across it, weigh it, and cross. The Berlin Wall was built to keep people in, and that was its crime.
The church before Constantine had lines and no walls. It had a long catechumenate before baptism, excommunication, creeds, and bitter fights over whether those who lapsed under persecution could return. Cyprian of Carthage could say in the 250s that there was no salvation outside the church, with no emperor behind him. What it did not have was the power to compel.
The Berlin Wall
Thomas Merton
The faith grew for nearly three centuries under intermittent persecution, by Rodney Stark's rough estimate around forty percent a decade, without the state behind it. Nobody forced the men of Christ. The apostles had nothing to gain, and by tradition most of them died for what they said they had seen. The word martyr means witness, and that is what their deaths were taken to be. Christ compels devotion; the arena proved it.
Thomas Merton is the later model of the line without the wall. He was wholly a monk of Christ and wholly open: he could sit with D. T. Suzuki or write to Abraham Heschel, honor what he found, and never need to call the other lodge counterfeit. He did not think Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity were equal; he thought charity toward them was part of being a Christian.
In 324 Constantine wrote to Alexander and Arius, calling their quarrel trivial and asking them to stop dividing the people. His successors enforced creeds by exile, confiscated churches, and law: Constantius and Valens for the Homoians, Theodosius for Nicaea. Bishops leaned on that power when it favored them and fled it when it did not. The Judaizing charge came from bishops; the exiles came from emperors.
In Vandal Africa the king enforced the creed himself. Geiseric took Carthage in 439 with perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand fighting men among a provincial population of millions, most of it Catholic. He exiled Catholic bishops and handed churches to Homoian clergy, but unevenly. Huneric went further. In 483 he deported 4,966 clergy and laity to the desert, by Victor of Vita's count. In February 484 he staged a council at Carthage, then issued an edict that turned the empire's own laws against heretics on the Catholics. At Tipasa, Victor reports, tongues and right hands were cut off. The Vandals and Alans, around eighty thousand by Victor's figure, were a minority among the Africans they ruled, and the Homoian creed marked who belonged to them.
Carthage
Gunthamund eased the persecution in the late 480s. Thrasamund pressed again and sent dozens of bishops into exile on Sardinia, Fulgentius of Ruspe among them. Hilderic, king from 523, ended it and recalled the exiles. The kingdom fell eleven years after the persecution ended. Gelimer deposed Hilderic in 530, Justinian took the deposition as his pretext, and Belisarius won at Ad Decimum in September 533 and at Tricamarum that December. Gelimer surrendered in 534.
Moorish kingdoms in the Aurès and Byzacena had been taking ground from the Vandals for decades, and around 530 the Moorish leader Antalas destroyed a Vandal army in Byzacena. The same confederations then fought Solomon and John Troglita for years after Belisarius left. Some of their rulers were themselves Christian. Rome, the Vandals, and the Byzantines each ruled over them; none replaced them.
The wall is the denial. A creed that keeps Christ's name and denies that he is God shuts its followers off from him. Arian emperors enforced it across the empire: Constantius and Valens drove Nicene bishops into exile, Athanasius among them, and under Valens, Socrates reports, eighty Nicene clergy who came to petition him were burned at sea. In Africa, Huneric's edict of February 484 made the denial law and gave Catholics until June 1 to accept it.
Constantine exiled Arius after Nicaea, and in 380 Theodosius made the Nicene faith the law of the empire and returned the churches to the Nicenes. His laws exiled Arian bishops and closed their assemblies. A man who lives in a house and condemns its father cannot stay in it: whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him (John 5:23), and a house divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:25). That was defense: the preservation of a confession that had been hunted and killed, by Rome before Constantine and by Arian emperors after him. Christ called for no wall, and the men of Christ reached for Him willingly.
Codex Argenteus
