Jesus v. Rome

The biblical Jesus, described in the Gospels as the son of a carpenter, was a Jew and a champion of the underdog. He rebelled against the occupying Roman government in what was then Palestine (at this point the Roman Empire stretched across the Mediterranean). He was crucified for upsetting the social order and challenging the authority of the Romans and their local Jewish leaders. The Romans crucified Jesus, a typical method of execution—especially for those accused of crimes against the government.

Jesus’ followers claim that after three days he rose from the grave and later ascended into heaven. His original followers, known as disciples or apostles, travelled great distances and spread Jesus’ message. His life is recorded in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are found in the New Testament. “Christ” means messiah or savior (this belief in a savior is a traditional part of Jewish theology).

Old and New Testaments

Early on, there were many ways that Christianity was practiced and understood, and it wasn’t until the 2nd century that Christianity began to be understood as a religion distinct from Judaism (it's helpful to remember that Judaism itself had many different sects). Christians were sometimes severely persecuted by the Romans. In the early 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine experienced a miraculous conversion and made it legally acceptable to be a Christian. Less than a hundred years later, the Roman Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official state religion.

The first Christians were Jews (whose bible we refer to as the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible). But soon pagans too converted to this new religion. Christians saw the predictions of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible come to fulfillment in the life of Jesus Christ—hence the “Bible” of the Christians includes both the Hebrew Bible (or the Old Testament) and the New Testament.

In addition to the fulfillment of prophecy, Christians saw parallels between the events of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. These parallels, or foreshadowings, are called typology. One example would be Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and the later sacrifice of Christ on the cross. We often see these comparisons in Christian art offered as a revelation of God’s plan for the salvation of mankind.

Source: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/introduction-cultures-religions-apah/christianity-apah/a/christianity-an-introduction

Saint Paul (10‒65 C.E.) = The transformation of Christianity from a small Jewish sect to a world religion began with him. an early convert whose missionary journeys in the eastern Roman Empire led to the founding of small Christian communities that included non-Jews.The Good News of Jesus, Paul argued, was for everyone, and Gentile (non-Jewish) converts need not follow Jewish laws or rituals such as circumcision. In one of his many letters to these new communities, later collected as part of the New Testament, Paul wrote,“There is neither Jew nor Greek . . . neither slave nor free . . . neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”17 Despite Paul’s egalitarian pronouncement, early Christianity, reflected prevailing patriarchal values, even as they both offered women new opportunities.

• Although women apparently played leadership roles in the “house churches” of the first century C.E., Paul counseled women to “be subject to your husbands” and declared that “it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”

trinity = Christianity holds that God has a three-part nature—that God is a trinity (God the father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ)* and that it was Jesus’s death on the cross—his sacrifice—that allowed for human beings to have the possibility of eternal life in heaven.

Eucharist (Communion) = Christians eat bread and drink wine to remember Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of humankind. Christ himself initiated this practice at the Last Supper. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox believe that the bread and wine literally transform into the body and blood of Christ, whereas Protestants and other Christians see the Eucharist as symbolic reminder and re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice.

The Annunciation = The angel Gabriel visits Mary to announce to her that she will be the mother of God. At this moment, Jesus Christ miraculously conceived, and God is made flesh and blood.

The Nativity = Mary gave birth to Christ in a stable while the animals watched. In works of art, Joseph, Mary’s husband, often sits off to the side and sleeps.

Adoration of the Magi = Three Magi (by tradition, kings from the East), follow a miraculous star that leads them to Christ, who has just been born in a stable. The Magi offer gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh (both are aromatic tree resins), and worship the infant Christ.

The Crucifixion = Christ is crucified at Golgotha as his mother Mary and the apostle John watch. Jesus is offered vinegar and soon dies. He is stabbed with a lance after his death. Pilate gives Joseph of Arimathea permission to take the body of Christ off the cross. Joseph places the body in a tomb and rolls a large stone over the door. Pilate orders guards to watch the tomb.

The Resurrection = Christ emerges triumphant from the tomb and carries the banner of the resurrection, a white flag with a red cross. This scene was first developed in Early Renaissance art.

Last Judgment = Christ is often represented in art as judge at the end of time. These scenes often show Christ enthroned in heaven surrounded by apostles and angels, who help him judge the souls of humankind. Good Christians go to heaven, a beautiful orderly place, and the damned go to hell where they are tormented for eternity.

Council of Nicea in 325 CE = resulted in a common statement of belief known as the Nicene Creed, which is still used by some churches today.

Comparison in AP World History: Modern

The different forms of Christianity come up at various times throughout the AP World History: Modern curriculum. Below are a few examples.

The two dominant early branches of Christianity were the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, rooted in Western and Eastern Europe respectively. Protestantism (and its different forms) emerged only later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Before that there was essentially just one church in Western Europe—what we would call the Roman Catholic church today (to differentiate it from other forms of Christianity in the West such as Lutheranism, Methodism etc.).

• They shared many similarities: the teachings of Jesus; the Bible; the sacraments; a church hierarchy of patriarchs, bishops, and priests; a missionary impulse; and intolerance toward other religions.

• Fundamental differences emerged such as: Disagreements about the nature of the Trinity, the source of the Holy Spirit, original sin, and the relative importance of faith and reason gave rise to much controversy. I will explore a few more differences below that led to what is know as The Great Schism in 1054 when representatives of both churches mutually excommunicated each other, declaring in effect that those in the opposing tradition were not true Christians.

*We will also look at Coptic and Nestorian Christianity below.

**There are also nontrinitian Christians which will be explored in class.

Roman Catholic (Latin) Christianity

Head of the Church

• the Roman Catholic Church maintained some degree of independence from political authorities

Language and Culture

• Latin remained the language of the Church and of elite communication in the West

• continued use of icons, popular paintings of saints and biblical scenes, usually painted on small wooden panels.

• Priests in the West shaved and, after 1050 or so, were supposed to remain celibate

Church Practices

• Catholics used unleavened bread in the Communion.

Diffusion of Roman Catholic Christianity

• see Jesuit case study below

Orthodox (Greek) Christianity

Head of the Church

• in Byzantium the emperor assumed something of the role of both “Caesar,” as head of state, and the pope, as head of the Church. Thus he appointed the patriarch, or leader, of the Orthodox Church; sometimes made decisions about doctrine; called church councils into session; and generally treated the Church as a government department.

• Eastern Orthodox leaders sharply rejected the growing claims of Roman popes to be the sole and final authority for all Christians everywhere.

Language and Culture

• Latin was abandoned in the Byzantine Empire in favor of Greek, which remained the basis for Byzantine education

• Byzantine thinkers sought to formulate Christian doctrine in terms of Greek philosophical concepts.

• Byzantine's prohibited the use of icons, popular paintings of saints and biblical scenes, usually painted on small wooden panels.

• Priests were allowed their beards to grow long and were permitted to marry

Church Practices

• Orthodox ritual called for using bread leavened with yeast in the Communion

Diffusion of Orthodox Christianity

• Eastern Orthodox Christianity thus came to Kievan Rus without the pressure of foreign military defeat or occupation. Eventually, it took deep root among the Russian people.

  • • Political and commercial considerations no doubt also played a role in Prince Vladimir’s (Kievan Rus) decision, and he acquired a sister of the Byzantine emperor as his bride, along with numerous Byzantine priests and advisers.

• Byzantine architectural styles

• the Cyrillic alphabet

• the extensive use of icons

• a monastic tradition stressing prayer and service

• political ideals of imperial control of the Church, all of which became part of a transformed Rus.

• Orthodoxy also provided a more unified identity for this emerging civilization and religious legitimacy for its rulers.

• Moscow would become known as the third Rome (with the fall of Constantinople in 1453), the final protector and defender of Orthodox Christianity. Though not widely proclaimed in Russia itself, such a notion reflected the “Russification” of Eastern Orthodoxy and its growing role as an element of Russian national identity.

Coptic Christianity

Egypt

• Following the Muslim conquest of Egypt,Christians continued to speak Coptic and practice their religion as dhimmis, legally inferior but protected people paying a special tax, under relatively tolerant Muslim rulers.

• The mid-fourteenth century (following the crusades and Mongol conquest of the Abbasid Caliphate) witnessed violent anti-Christian pogroms, destruction of churches, and the forced removal of Christians from the best land.

• a substantial Christian minority persisted among the literate in urban areas and in monasteries located in remote regions.

• In the early twenty-frst century, Egyptian Christians still numbered about 10 percent of the population.

Ethiopia

• Over the centuries of Islamic expansion, Ethiopia became a Christian island in a Muslim sea, protected by its mountainous geography and its distance from major centers of Islamic power.

• Unique practices:

  • • a fascination with Judaism and Jerusalem, reflected in a much-told story about the visit of an Ethiopian Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. The story includes an episode in which Solomon seduces the Queen, producing a child who becomes the founding monarch of the Ethiopian state.

    • Since Solomon figures in the line of descent to Jesus, it meant that Ethiopia’s Christian rulers could legitimate their position by tracing their ancestry to Jesus himself

    • Ethiopian monks long maintained a presence in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, said to mark the site where Jesus was crucified and buried.

    • in the twelfth century, the rulers of a new Ethiopian dynasty constructed a remarkable series of twelve linked underground churches, apparently attempting to create a New Jerusalem on Christian Ethiopian soil, as the original city lay under Muslim control.

• In modern Ethiopia, over 60 percent of the country’s population retain their affiliation with this ancient Christian church

Nestorian Christianity

• Nestorius, the fifth-century bishop of Constantinople, argued that Mary had given birth only to the human Jesus, who then became the “temple” of God. (divide Jesus into two persons, one human and the other divine)

• centered in Syria, Iraq, and Persia, sometimes called the Church of the East

Tang dynasty China

• Nestorian church, initiated in 635 by a Persian missionary monk, had taken root in China with the approval of the country’s Tang dynasty rulers.

• Both its art and literature articulated the Christian message using Buddhist and Daoist concepts

• The written texts themselves, known as the Jesus Sutras, refer to Christianity as the “Religion of Light from the West” or the “Luminous Religion.” They describe God as the “Cool Wind,” sin as “bad karma,” and a good life as one of “no desire” and “no action.” “People can live only by dwelling in the living breath of God,” the Jesus Sutras declare. “All the Buddhas are moved by this wind, which blows everywhere in the world.”

• In the mid-ninth century the Chinese state turned against all religions of foreign origin, Islam and Buddhism as well as Christianity

Mongols

• Mongol conquest of China in the thirteenth century ofered a brief opportunity for Christianity’s renewal, as the religiously tolerant Mongols welcomed Nestorian Christians as well as various other faiths.

• A number of prominent Mongols became Christians, including one of the wives of Chinggis Khan.

• Considering Jesus as a powerful shaman, Mongols also appreciated that Christians, unlike Buddhists, could eat meat and unlike Muslims, could drink alcohol, even including it in their worship.

• Mongol rule was short, ending in 1368, and the small number of Chinese Christians ensured that the faith almost completely vanished with the advent of the vigorously Confucian Ming dynasty

Comparison in AP World History: Modern

There are numerous examples of the influence of the Jesuits throughout the AP World History: Modern curriculum. Below are a few examples.

1.) Native Americans in Spain’s New World empire

• Goal:

  • • Spanish missionaries working in a colonial setting sought primarily to convert the masses

• Accommodations:

  • • little attempts made, but instead made a frontal attacks on Native American religions in the Spanish Empire

    • Europeans claimed an exclusive religious truth and sought the utter destruction of local gods and everything associated with them.

• religious and cultural outcomes

  • • officially, mass conversion to Christianity took place in Latin America

BUT

• • • Christians also took part in rituals derived from the past, with little sense that this was incompatible with Christian practice.

    • Incantations to various gods for good fortune in hunting, farming, or healing; sacrifices of self-bleeding; offerings to the sun; divination; the use of hallucinogenic drugs — all of these rituals provided spiritual assistance in those areas of everyday life not directly addressed by Christian rites.

    • Conversely, these practices also showed signs of Christian influence. Wax candles, normally used in Christian services, might now appear in front of a stone image of a precolonial god. The anger of a neglected saint, rather than that of a traditional god, might explain someone’s illness and require offerings, celebration, or a new covering to regain his or her favor.10 In such ways did Christianity take root in the new cultural environments of Spanish America, but it was a distinctly Andean or Mexican Christianity, not merely a copy of the Spanish version.

• Reasons for outcomes

  • • The decisive conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires and all that followed from it — disease, population collapse, loss of land to Europeans, forced labor, resettlement into more compact villages — created a setting in which the religion of the victors took hold in Spanish American colonies

    • Europeans saw their political and military success as a demonstration of the power of the Christian God. Native American peoples generally agreed, and by 1700 or earlier the vast majority had been baptized and saw themselves in some respects as Christians.

    • colonial authorities quickly smashed attempts to revive indigenous beliefs

• Impact of this approach

  • • Women:

      • • Despite the prominence of the Virgin Mary as a religious figure across Latin America, the cost of conversion was high, especially for women.

        • Many women, who had long served as priests, shamans, or ritual specialists, had no corresponding role in a Catholic church, led by an all-male clergy.

        • convent life, which had provided some outlet for female authority and education in Catholic Europe, was reserved largely for Spanish women in the Americas.

• frustration with the persistence of “idolatry, superstition, and error” boiled over into violent campaigns designed to uproot old religions once and for all. In 1535, the bishop of Mexico proudly claimed that he had destroyed 500 pagan shrines and 20,000 idols.

• seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, church authorities in the Andean region periodically launched movements of “extirpation,” designed to fatally undermine native religion. They destroyed religious images and ritual objects, publicly urinated on native “idols,” desecrated the remains of ancestors, fogged “idolaters,” and held religious trials and “processions of shame” aimed at humiliating offenders

• efforts at blending two religious traditions, reinterpreting Christian practices within an Andean framework, and incorporating local elements into an emerging Andean Christianity were common

  • • local gods, or huacas took the names of Christian saints, seeking to appropriate for themselves the religious power of Christian figures.

    • women might offer the blood of a llama to strengthen a village church or make a cloth covering for the Virgin Mary and a shirt for an image of a huaca with the same material.

• One resilient Andean resident inquired of a Jesuit missionary: “Father, are you tired of taking our idols from us? Take away that mountain if you can, since that is the God I worship.”

• Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe neatly combined both Mesoamerican and Spanish notions of Divine Motherhood.

2.) China during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties

• Goal: the Jesuits, took deliberate aim at the official Chinese elite.

  • • Matteo Ricci (in China 1582–1610), many Jesuits learned Chinese, became thoroughly acquainted with classical Confucian texts, and dressed like Chinese scholars

    • emphasized their interest in exchanging ideas and learning from China’s ancient culture.

• Accommodations:

  • • In presenting Christian teachings, Jesuits were at pains to be respectful of Chinese culture, pointing out parallels between Confucianism and Christianity rather than portraying it as something new and foreign.

    • They chose to define Chinese rituals honoring the emperor or venerating ancestors as secular or civil observances rather than as religious practices that had to be abandoned

• religious and cultural outcomes

  • • Nothing approaching mass conversion to Christianity took place in China

    • a modest number of Chinese scholars and officials did become Christians, attracted by the personal lives of the missionaries, by their interest in Western science, and by the moral certainty that Christianity offered.

    • Jesuit missionaries found favor for a time at the Chinese imperial court, where their mathematical, astronomical, technological, and map-making skills rendered them useful

    • Jesuits were appointed to head the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy

    • Christianity spread very modestly amid tales of miracles attributed to the Christian God

    • while missionary teachings about “eternal life” sounded to some like Daoist prescriptions for immortality.

    • At most, missionary efforts over the course of some 250 years (1550– 1800) resulted in 200,000 to 300,000 converts, a minuscule number in a Chinese population approaching 300 million by 1800.

• Reasons for outcomes

  • • Jesuit missionaries offered little that the Chinese really needed. Confucianism for the elites and Buddhism, Daoism, and a multitude of Chinese gods and spirits at the local level adequately supplied the spiritual needs of most Chinese.

    • Christianity was an all-or-nothing faith that required converts to abandon much of traditional Chinese culture.

    • Christian monogamy, for example, seemed to require Chinese men to put away their concubines. What would happen to these deserted women?

• Impact of this approach

  • • By the early eighteenth century, the papacy and competing missionary orders came to oppose the Jesuit policy of accommodation. The pope claimed authority over Chinese Christians and declared that sacrifces to Confucius and the veneration of ancestors were “idolatry” and thus forbidden to Christians. The pope’s pronouncements represented an unacceptable challenge to the authority of the emperor and an afront to Chinese culture. In 1715, an outraged Emperor Kangxi wrote:

I ask myself how these uncultivated Westerners dare to speak of the great precepts of China. . . . [T]heir doctrine is of the same kind as the little heresies of the Buddhist and Taoist monks. . . . These are the greatest absurdities that have ever been seen. As from now I forbid the Westerners to spread their doctrine in China; that will spare us a lot of trouble.

This represented a major turning point in the relationship of Christian missionaries and Chinese society. Many were subsequently expelled, and missionaries lost favor at court.

• Jesuit willingness to work under the Manchurian Qing dynasty, which came to power in 1644, discredited them with those Chinese scholars who viewed the Qing as uncivilized foreigners and their rule in China as disgraceful and illegitimate.

• Missionaries’ reputation as miracle workers further damaged their standing as men of science and rationality, for elite Chinese often regarded miracles and supernatural religion as superstitions, fit only for the uneducated masses.

• Some viewed the Christian ritual of Holy Communion as a kind of cannibalism.

• Others came to see missionaries as potentially subversive, for various Christian groups met in secret, and such religious sects had often provided the basis for peasant rebellion.

• it did not escape Chinese notice that European Christians had taken over the Philippines and that their warships were active in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the missionaries, with their great interest in maps, were spies for these aggressive foreigners