It would be wrong to consider the study of religion a futile endeavor, especially as we witness a violent religious and obscurantist backlash against progressivism and science. The role of religions has been enormous, at least since Sumer and Egypt, both politically and psychologically. My interest in the subject goes back a long way: I had already attempted a very concise history of religions in 1994. Regarding the origins of Christianity, my 2007 article on “the invention of Jesus” surveyed all the Jewish currents that might have led to Christianity, classifying them roughly into three tendencies: Jewish Messianism, Essene Millenarianism, and Hellenized Apocalypticism. I did not, however, address the historical constitution of Christianity, which I reduced to an emergence from those prior movements. In focusing on the invention of Jesus, I missed both the triggering role of John the Baptist and the radical innovation introduced by Paul — the true founder of Christianity as we know it — even though he had to contend with other currents that would eventually absorb him. The figure of Paul is all the more important because his messianism without a messiah haunts many revolutionaries (not only Benjamin, Agamben, or Badiou).
It must be said that attempting to reconstruct such a tangled chronology is a strange adventure — a genuine detective investigation, full of false leads, backtracks, and revised chronologies and translations. After lengthy research, however, one can arrive at a reasonably solid (if simplified) reconstruction of Christianity’s emergence from different currents, shaped in the aftermath of events — in particular, the crushing of the Jews and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. This is not, of course, intended to convince anyone — that would require citing too many sources (available to those who seek them) — but it is very instructive to measure the gap between the narrative we have drawn from it, which we naively believe in despite all its contradictions, and this evolving combination of heterogeneous elements, reshaping itself after the fact under the pressure of historical events, and then from council to council, drifting ever further from the original positions.
From Jewish Messianism to Jesus
Without invoking all the precursors that have been lined up and that will participate in its construction, we should, in keeping with the Gospels, trace the origins of Christianity back to John the Baptist. He was the dominant figure, at the turn of the century, within the vast movement of Jewish religious renewal in the face of Roman domination — a very diverse ferment that is misleadingly grouped under the overly restrictive label of the Essenes. The Dead Sea Scrolls show that this covered quite distinct tendencies: messianic, apocalyptic, sectarian, forming part of a broader movement. There is an obvious continuity between Christianity and the “Essenes” (the communion of bread and wine, etc.), and what is certain is that the Essenes were part of the atmosphere of Judaism at the time, alongside the apocalyptic messianism that John the Baptist claimed as his own — the very soil of primitive Christianity, which awaited the end while everything crumbled around it.
There is a contradiction between the Gospels’ portrayal of John the Baptist and that of Flavius Josephus, who acknowledges John’s ability to gather crowds while assimilating him to the sectarian practices of the Essenes — making his considerable influence, which justified his execution, hard to understand. It is more plausible to accept that he had genuinely innovated by opening baptism as a rite of conversion to “all Israel,” whereas it had previously been reserved for initiates after their purifying ascesis. This better explains why the Hellenists and the diaspora adopted his Johannine baptism, a rite that would become the foundation of Christianity. It is probably a retrospective illusion to make John the Baptist a precursor of the opening to the conversion of non-Jews, but this was indeed at the heart of the early Christians’ debates, up to Paul who definitively settled it over the hesitations of the Jewish-Christians. What is striking is that the latter still seemed to have difficulty opposing it, as if they acknowledged its legitimacy (in memory of John the Baptist?). In any case, with baptism and the opening to sinners — if not yet to pagans — we have the foundation of Christianity in the making.
The Gospels are very explicitly set in the continuity of John the Baptist, who is said to have announced the coming of the Christ who would succeed him, inaugurating the Last Judgment and the end of times: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Thus, the composition of the first real Gospel (that of Mark), far later — since it postdates 70 CE — can be attributed to a Hellenist disciple of John the Baptist (and of Paul), who wished to illustrate in fiction the fulfillment of this prophecy by giving flesh to this Jesus and his fantastic adventures (though the original version ends at the empty tomb, without a resurrected Jesus appearing to the apostles). He also drew on other sources and more traditional teachings, often close to the Dead Sea Scrolls. At the time there were all sorts of prophets, visionaries, healers, and magicians, which surprised no one, alongside the more conventional teachings of Hillel — prefiguring, in milder form (“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor — that is the whole Torah”), what would become, in the Gospel, Jesus’s supreme commandment (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”). This demonstrates the great permeability between these very diverse currents.
Shortly after the martyrdom of John the Baptist, around the year 30 CE, James the Just is presented as the leader of the first Christian community in Jerusalem — anachronistic, but attesting to his spiritual authority, recognized by both Paul and Thomas. The fact that we repeat the title given him in the Gospel as “brother of Jesus” is misleading, because in the pre-Gospel sources he is called “brother of the Christ,” which is quite another thing: it does not refer to a specific historical figure but rather places him within Jewish messianism. James the Just, regarded as a “master of the Law,” was essentially an ascetic and a religious man devoted to the poor, respected as a saint in Jerusalem. According to Hegesippus, “James, surnamed the Just, drank no wine or cider, ate no meat, cut no hair, used no perfumes, took no baths, wore linen, and prayed at length for the people in the Temple.” This did not prevent him from being executed as well, thrown from the top of the Temple in 62 CE by the high priest, who saw in him both a rival and a heretic. A marginal scholar, Robert Eisenman, sought to identify James the Just with the Essene “Teacher of Righteousness,” which does not fit the earlier datings of the Dead Sea Scrolls but highlights the kinship of his asceticism with that of the Essenes, though less mystical and sectarian. The Ebionites, who remained loyal to James and rejected Paul — refusing to abandon their Judaism — represent this primitive Jewish-Christianity in the service of the poor. The Didache reflects this “Jewish-Christianity” well: principles of wisdom also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, yet still anchored in the Judaism of the Temple. Indeed, while James the Just shares many features with John the Baptist, he differs from him clearly by remaining centered on the Temple and privileging works over conversion — though both belonged to the same movement of religious renewal.
Up to this point, we have nothing more than an evolution within Judaism, and still no Jesus (at least in the oldest layer), and even less a crucifixion. This is where the Hellenization of Judaism comes in, asserting itself from Philo of Alexandria to the Therapeutae who wished to heal souls, while other esotericisms were developing — such as that of Hermes Trismegistus (who spoke of the son of God). It is here that the name Jesus — meaning “savior” — would become the standard-bearer of the esoteric Jewish (or Gnostic) tendency, expressed in the Gospel of Thomas, for which the kingdom is within us. This “Gospel” explicitly pledges allegiance to James the Just (Jesus tells them: “Wherever you are, go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being”). This was no doubt intended to connect the communities of Alexandria to their ancestral homeland and affirm their belonging to Judaism, but it also allows us to date the text and shows how James the Just — who stressed the “works” of faith and cannot be equated with Thomas — could draw together the various pre-Christian currents through his holiness.
The name Jesus, very common but meaning “savior” (like the given name Salvatore), may have been adopted earlier by the messianic movements, but it appears with Thomas as a way of Judaizing “hermetic” wisdom, reduced however to the simple formula introducing each of the logia: “Jesus said.” There we find many parables that will be taken up in the Gospels, presumed to belong to a “Q source” on which Matthew would have drawn — possibly just another version of this “proto-Gospel.” But it contains no narrative or crucifixion of this Jesus as a teacher of wisdom and inner salvation, while prefiguring the Beatitudes on many points (inversion of values). In the Sermon on the Mount (an initiatory genre), one must distinguish two almost incompatible parts: the Beatitudes, which stand above the Law and are far removed from Essenism, and the “Antitheses,” whose guilt-inducing rigorism is much closer to it and recurs in the Didache.
The Fusion of the Wisdom Jesus and the Sacrificed Christ
Beyond this Jesus as teacher of wisdom, those whom the Acts of the Apostles calls the Hellenists were decisive early actors in Christianity — the very group Paul had sought to persecute before his conversion on the road to Damascus. He did not invent the Jesus-Christ of his vision, since he was fighting that figure’s followers, notably because they opposed the Temple and saw themselves as more universalist. It is probable that these Hellenists were originally disciples of John the Baptist, for they adopted his baptism and opened it to all. In any case, these Greek-speaking Jews, after the death of John the Baptist, gave shape to the Jesus he had announced as his successor, fusing the Jesus of wisdom with the mystical Christ of the Essenes — the figure of the “Suffering Servant” (Isaiah 53) and even his Paschal sacrifice — but as a cosmic rather than terrestrial event, as with Paul. It is through them that Christianity could begin the fusion of the Jewish tradition with Platonism (beyond Philo of Alexandria), detaching it from political messianism and ethnic belonging in favor of an eschatological millennialism — all of them convinced that the end was very near.
These Greco-Essenes are indeed the first Christians and the least known, though they appear in the Acts of the Apostles through the charismatic-prophetic figures of Philip and Stephen. Stephen would become the first Christian martyr, stoned because he contested the idea that God could be confined to a temple. He impressed by his faith, proclaiming: “I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God,” and even crying out, before falling under the blows, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them!” Yet it is far from certain that, for him, Jesus had already come — “for we have heard him say that Jesus will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses gave us.” The Hellenists’ protest, mentioned in Acts, against their exclusion from the charitable service to the poor of Jerusalem shows both the rejection they inspired and their belonging to the same community. After Stephen’s martyrdom, the Hellenists were driven out of Jerusalem and joined the diaspora, becoming the first missionaries of the new faith, converting populations (including non-Jews) through baptism — a deterritorialized rite, independent of the Temple, and highly mobile. The beginnings of Christianity are essentially a baptismal movement in which baptism replaced circumcision as the marker of belonging to the community (along with shared meals and participation in the support of the poor and widows). “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark). It is worth noting that a distinction was drawn between those who had received “the baptism of John” (Acts 18:24–25) and those who had received “the baptism of Jesus,” who would supersede them.
Paul, the Revelation of the Cross, and the Theology of Weakness
It is on this basis that Paul would truly create a Christianity open to pagans and separating itself from Judaism — though remaining fairly marginal before the Jewish War and the destruction of the Temple. He too acknowledged the authority of James, or at least sought his impossible approval in abandoning Jewish law. His relationship with the Hellenists is equally ambiguous, for he profoundly transformed their theology, authorizing himself only on the basis of his own visionary revelations. He made their celestial Christ a crucified one — no more talk of a Jesus as teacher of wisdom. Instead he accentuated the apocalyptic tendency of Persian inspiration, already present, among others, in the Essenes (the Rule of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness). One may consider Paul to be first and foremost the name for the deep influence of Persian cosmology — so present in Antioch, where he began his preaching, which had been the capital of the Iranian Seleucid Empire (to which Tarsus had belonged) until 64 BCE. Yet he was merely extending this influence on the Judaism of his time, which attenuated the dualism — a dualism that would return constantly throughout history.
His theology, following the lead of late Judaism influenced by Persia, takes up many Zoroastrian themes — in particular the sacrifice and resurrection of the final savior. The “Son of Man” plays the role of the Saoshyant, the Zoroastrian savior, Zoroaster’s miraculous son, born of a virgin impregnated by the prophet’s preserved seed, tasked with vanquishing Evil and resurrecting the dead. The theme of the “Son of Man,” already taken up in the Books of Enoch and in the Aramaic fragments found at Qumran, betrays — despite its denial — this Persian origin, as does the ancient adoption of the light/darkness, good/evil, truth/falsehood dualisms, as well as the themes of resurrection, judgment, and final salvation. One could say that Paul draws on the most Persia-saturated strand of Judaism in order to push it to the point of rupture with Judaism itself. However, this is not a simple conversion to Persian dualism, as Manichaeism would be, but a reinterpretation in the shadow of the cross, claiming to be a strict monotheism that transcends dualism by acknowledging that evil has no being of its own — this despite the adoption of the figure of Satan (“the god of this world,” 2 Cor 4:4), who substitutes for the Zoroastrian god of evil in the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. The irony of (sacred) history is that this monotheism that refuses dualism will need the Trinity to safeguard its coherence.
But the essential point lies elsewhere — in what constitutes the heart of his theology of the cross: the strength of the weak and the vanquished. “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10). It is not “despite defeat” that salvation comes, but “through defeat” and in defeat. This inversion of values, already present in the Beatitudes, made it admittedly a “slaves’ religion” — yet one that initially seduced the elites, weary of Stoicism and the empty morality of the Masters. René Girard claims that Christianity’s novelty lay in recognizing the innocence of the victim — which is simply delusional, given how many examples of this exist elsewhere. The sacrifice of the god is itself not at all original. One cannot say that the reversal of weakness into strength is new either — it can be found everywhere (not only in Taoism) — but Paul’s theology of weakness is more radical in its inversion of values (echoed in the Gospel’s “the last shall be first”), which would paradoxically end up governing the Empire. Without dwelling here on his theology of defeat, we can understand that it would be decisive after 70 CE.
Several points deserve emphasis. First, in his earliest letters — and despite an obvious interpolation quite out of character with his style (1 Cor 15:3–5) — Paul, no more than Thomas, speaks of a historical Jesus but only of a divine Jesus-Christ, the one of his vision. Above all, he is the first to introduce the theme of the crucifixion (kerygmatic). He speaks of nothing else, but as a cosmic drama with little (if any) reference to historical events. His earliest letters are dated to the 40s CE, while the first accounts of Christ’s passion postdate 70 CE. It is from his epistles that the creation of a universal Christianity dates — one that makes Christ’s crucifixion the sacrifice that saves us. This is a reversal of apocalypticism and a messianism in the past tense, for the awaited Messiah has already come, not in glory but covered in infamy — which marks the end of Jewish political messianism, while retaining a connection to Judaism — and would ultimately suit the Empire perfectly.
From Marcion’s New Testament to the Fixing of Dogma
While Christianity finds its specificity with Paul and the theology of the cross, this constitutes only one element that had to negotiate with other tendencies and, in particular, gave rise to a narrative staging of its mystical conceptions in numerous Gospels constructing the myth as the “fulfillment of the Scriptures.” To search for a prophet who was really crucified (or a Jesus hanged on the eve of Passover, as the Talmud mentions) who might have served as a model is a hopeless and pointless endeavor, because the triggering event of Christianity was not such a person but Paul’s vision, and then the destruction of the Temple. Vague resemblances cannot satisfy believers who refuse to accept that they have been deceived — they want to believe in miracles and in the resurrection! Those who insist on preserving the historicity of a Jesus, of whom there is no archaeological trace, cannot agree on which one, and this supposedly simpler hypothesis adds nothing — other than assuming that the first believers were talking about a concrete man and that the Gospels are not reconstructions — except that those who denied his historical existence were equally ancient (Docetism, among others) and denounced from the start by those who defended the Incarnation. In fact, after the mass crucifixions of the Jewish War, there was no need for any specific real events to stage this new theology of the cross and salvation through defeat. As always, it was the success of these Gospels as they were transmitted orally (there were dozens of them, some quite fantastical) that validated the approach — though this rather distorted the initial project, muddying the waters, especially of course after it became the official religion. In any case, it was only at the very beginning of the 2nd century, with Ignatius of Antioch making Jesus a martyr (one who had borne witness in his flesh through his sacrifice), that the (historical) Incarnation sought to impose itself against the mythicist interpretations.
For a long time I was skeptical about the existence of Paul, whose epistles we know only through Marcion, before accepting through textual analysis that he could have been present at the very beginnings of Christianity and constituted its true founder — though very much a minority figure at first — before his theology spread once the defeat of Judaism was complete. What is astonishing is that he seems to have been almost forgotten (in favor of the Gospels), even though he had provided the framework of the religion of the crucified — which the Gospels had seized upon — and it took Marcion to publish his letters much later, before the Roman Church adopted them, positioning Paul at both the very beginning of Christianity and its moment of closure.
The role of Marcion in the formalization of Catholic orthodoxy is very revealing of the situation at that rather late date, when he too contested the historical existence of Jesus. He retained only the Gospel of Luke, stripped of all Jewish references (and Old Testament quotations) as well as of the birth and genealogy of Jesus, but he believed that his anti-Judaic Christianity could fit within the Christian movement — to the point of donating a considerable sum (200,000 sesterces) to the Roman Church, which would nonetheless excommunicate him in 144 CE for heresy, though this would not prevent the Marcionite Church from flourishing.
He defended a genuinely dualist doctrine — yet further testimony to the influence of Zoroastrianism and a cosmic dualism that had penetrated not only late Judaism, as we have seen, and the Essene and Baptist sects, or the mages Simon and Theudas, but also the new cult of Mithra, which would inspire much later the quest for the Holy Grail. Not being Jewish but a Greek from northern Turkey, his contribution was the opposition between the vengeful god of the “Old Testament” and the God of Love of the “New Testament” (as he called the preaching of Jesus) — where, as Paul insisted, Love replaces the Law — and he accordingly preached a break with Judaism, which the Church rejected (the Incarnation requiring its historicity), though it would adopt his vocabulary. It was in response to his condemnation that he published his sources: his Gospel (an “amputated” version of Luke) and above all the Apostolikon, ten letters of Paul, gathered for the first time and this time adopted by the Church (with revisions). For it was in reaction to Marcion’s offensive that the Church sought to establish its Creed and harmonize the Gospels, as Tatian’s Diatessaron attempted to do in 160 CE. The four Gospels would henceforth be cited together, but it is the publication of Paul’s letters that had provided the final coherence, returning to the original source.
Christian Syncretism
However, if from around 170 CE the Pauline letters were integrated into the “proto-Catholic” canon, it was a corrected Paul — no longer the apocalyptic Paul, nor the dualist Paul of Marcion, but a doctrinal Paul in the service of ecclesiastical order, a theological justification of spiritual power, obscuring the subtleties of his theology of crucifixion and weakness beneath more conventional traditions (charity). Christianity was not born from a prophet named Jesus, nor from John the Baptist, nor from Paul alone, but from a series of successive recompositions: the apocalyptic expectation and the call to conversion (John the Baptist); Judean asceticism devoted to the poor (James); Hellenized wisdom (Thomas); the theology of crucifixion and universal salvation (Paul); and then proto-Catholic normalization (that is what councils are for). This is not a mere arbitrary and contingent juxtaposition but the synergy of a combination of a prophetic pole, a communal pole, and the Hellenized circles that developed a universalist interpretation. Prophetism supplied the religious energy, community provided a social structure, Hellenization enabled expansion — but it is Paul’s gesture that is the most original and decisive, constituting a complete reversal of the original apocalypticism.
In the midst of a multitude of sects, the elaboration of Christianity cannot be attributed to a single man, nor to a single source, nor to an immutable revealed doctrine — if only because of its internal contradiction between the figure of a celestial Christ, with no regard for his historical life, and what the Gospels would make of it: a mythological narrative demanding credence in all its absurdities and miracles. These contradictions are the scars of its multiple origins, of a continuous rearrangement of Jewish, Persian, and Mediterranean matrices, from which the “theology of weakness” and the cross was fashioned — a theology that would dominate the West for centuries and continued to evolve, notably with the age of martyrs exalted by Montanism, and of course Augustine, who would be an essential stage, particularly in the matter of inner guilt (less marked in Eastern Christianity), and finally in the late integration of a cult of the Virgin — a resurgence of Zoroastrianism, but also of Celtic traditions — which reflected the importance of women’s faith.
What is remarkable is seeing opposing conceptions all claiming to represent true Christianity, without doubting their belonging to the same general movement (calls for unity are constant). There was an undeniable appeal in its universal morality as in its eschatology, bringing together all sorts of theologies — rather as Marxism witnessed a great diversity of interpretations and groupuscules citing Marx, all believing in equality and the end of History without agreeing on the rest. We thus have different, more or less incompatible, figures: the one God and the Law of Judaism; the Greek Logos and the flesh/spirit dualism; the dying and rising god of mystery cults and Zoroastrianism; the traditions of wisdom and Egyptian Hermeticism. Yet these contradictions enabled Christianity to address different audiences. The pious Jew could be reassured by the constant references to the fulfillment of prophecy in Matthew. Illiterate masses were captivated by the narrative and miraculous stories of Mark. Mystics found themselves in Paul’s cosmic Christ or the secret words of the Gospel according to Thomas. But they could all gather around the Beatitudes and charity.
The Time of the End: Between the Already and the Not Yet
With Walter Benjamin, the “theology of defeat” survives the death of God in a secular version of the Pauline kairos: time is not continuous; it is constantly suspended by the possibility of redemption. Redemption through the negative, the saving power of disaster, recurs in Adorno, Taubes, Agamben, and Žižek. For Taubes, Paul thinks the kairos, time in tension, “the time of the end”: “I tell you, brothers, the time has been contracted” (1 Cor 7). What is remarkable, in fact, is that since Paul, Christianity has found itself in an in-between time that is quite familiar to us — between the already and the not yet of an end of history that keeps being deferred. Since Christ died for us on the cross, there is no other savior to await; the kingdom is already here in the conversion of the Empire, before the final apocalypse that the first Christians believed imminent (as do we). And yet everything continues as before — so what is this time of suspension that goes on and on, this phony war before the catastrophe?
“Benjamin is to Paul what the modern catastrophe is to the cross: the moment when defeat becomes promise.”
— Jacob Taubes
