The Christian Dialectic and The Synthetic Bible.
How a revolutionary social movement became state religion. Or, the religious genealogy of republic and empire.
While the early Christianity had an extensive metaphysics represented by the various “Gnostic” traditions, they were not what attracted early Christians. Or, perhaps more accurately is not what solidified them into a social movement. That came from the opportunity to reject the world view of Rome, which had fallen to despotism, and remove themselves from society. And this rejection was successful, but in removing from themslves from society and rejecting a metaphysics that had fallen to despotism – where despotism had not been the norm until its very end – they created the need for a new metaphysics that had no choice but to normalize the despotic milieu in which it formed. Thus early Christianity came to sustain the very thing it had originally rejected. In other words what occurred between the end of the Hellenistic world and the beginning of Christendom was a thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialect.
That synthesis was enshrined by the Council of Nicaea. The Roman Emperor had regional bishops set an orthodoxy for Christianity. This was not a shrewd co-optation of Early Christianity for Imperial purposes, but a moment of crisis management in the midst of a revolution. The very pillars of society – the pagan gods of the Pantheon and everything they represented - were rejected as false, evil, or even worse meaningless. People en masse exiled themselves to the wilderness or demanded their own crucifixion by the tens of thousands. In this situation the basic structure of the world was in question, and for good reason.
What was the Res Publica had become the private property of Ceasars. These men gave out pieces of his new property to friends or allies not as a kindness but as a necessity so that they might gain support against the restoration of the Republic they had taken control of. This theft had to be secured by a private military, separated from the interests of the public, that was funded first by purse of the late Julius Caesar and later through taxation on the newly formed kingdom. And it was from this private military that most Caesars found their start.
Christian cults spread like a fire through Greece and Italy as people saw in it a way to resist this betrayal. In part, it worked by allowing the co-optation and re-approriation of symbols of the imperial cult against the empire itself. Early Christians pitted Jesus Christ against Augustus Caesar; two men who bore the title “Son of God”.
Jesus was born during the reign Augustus, 27 years after Augustus was titled “Son of God” and “Father of the Fatherland”. It was Augustus who had converted the Province of Syria, an independent region of the Roman republic, to the Kingdom of Judea that for the first time was required to pay taxes to the imperial treasury. This change was met with popular resistance and led to a number of violent rebellions. Notably, the first was lead by a man named Judas in 6AD and would be put down by the adopted son of Augustus and future heir Tiberius . It would be the non-violent rebellion of Jesus Christ and execution during the reign of Tiberius that would spread the story of these rebellions against imperialism west into Greece and Rome. To render onto Caesar only that which is Caesar’s is open rebellion when Caesar claims all.
This single issue on which early Christians and early Imperialists certainly agreed - that God had a son - allowed for the juxtaposition of the two ideologies. This common ground must be seen as the foundational agreement that made the bible possible; a book whose content was specified by agreement of Christian bishops and approved by Roman Emperor. By understanding the Bible as synthetic it then becomes possible to reverse engineer that synthesis by comparing the edicts and declarations of Augustus, Tiberius, and other early Emperors to the body of works termed Gnostic and both to the Bible.
Ultimately such a goal is beyond the scope of an essay such as this, but this essay can at least stand as an argument for engaging in such a goal. Certain very notable passages of the bible can be seen as Augustine rather than Gnostic immediately with little effort. Augustine Edicts making marriage mandatory and outlawing homosexuality compare directly to passages of the bible and are in total contradiction to Gnostic ideas which saw procreation as a sin because it trapped the light of the soul in a material body.
From an historic perspective the decision to incorporate this into the synthesis is relatively obvious. Gnosticism was essentially an apocalyptic death cult which invited the end of the world (something appearing elsewhere in The Bible). During Augutus’ Reign, after the Roman Civil War and fall of the Republic, social mores like marriage had broken down nearly entirely and the idea of raising children appears to have been quiet rightly the last thing on most people’s mind. For the Council of Nicaea, when such mores were still undermined and the Empire was attempting to establish a new productive social order, the choice between “go forth and multiply” and “birth is a sin” would have been relatively easy. They chose both, as a synthesis should.