The man whose memory we are honouring today, the late Professor Daniel O'Hara S.J., often described his own academic work as providing a collection of footnotes to Eusebius. Hence the title of this lecture, Political Footnotes to Eusebius: The Contribution of the Early Church to Political Thought. When Monsignor Allan approached me to lecture on this topic for this occasion, my inclination was to decline for, as I told him, “I really do not know too much about the topic.” On telling this to my friend Sam Beris, he said: “Haim, lack of knowledge never stopped you before from lecturing on various topics. Then again, one way to get to know something about a topic is to prepare a lecture on it.” This is what I have done. I think I have learnt a lot in preparing this lecture, so I thank the Monsignor for the honour he did me in asking me to deliver it. Nevertheless, I have one request from you, the audience: if this lecture falls beneath your expectations, the persons to blame, apart from me, are the Monsignor and Mr. Sam Beris.

Before I begin, I shall apologize for talking in a “politically incorrect manner” during my lecture. I do so because virtually all the texts I shall be referring to in the lecture do so. That is to say, I shall often use the word “men” when I literally mean “men and women”, “him” when I mean “him and her” and “he” when I mean “he and she”. I hope that this will not confuse nor offend any of you too much.

The Christian religion is founded on the biography of man who was a convict, an individual executed for alleged offences against Roman Law, a person accused of being no friend to Caesar, a person who in fact had said that, while tribute must be paid to Caesar, there is also tribute to be paid elsewhere. The Apostles and the Church Fathers did things they hoped would make their religion politically more respectable. But, fortunately, they failed. The disreputable taint survived. It made Christians, albeit reluctantly, men who turned the world upside down, the makers of a revolution that affected all moral and social thought, and not least political thought.

In brief, what early Christianity did was to make pure political thought impossible. All later political thought has had to take cognizance of the nonpolitical. Every later thinker has had to reckon with the possibility, at the very least, that political actions may also have moral implications, that man may be more than a political animal, that man may not live by bread alone and that he may have another king apart from Caesar. The Christian may have often have interpreted all too literally the injunction to make friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness, but he has also known that Mammon is not God, that man owes more service to one than to the other, and that paying tribute to Caesar is only giving back to Caesar the Mammon which is all that Caesar owns.

Neither Jesus nor his disciples originated these concepts. They were concepts which had a long history in Jewish thought. Christianity did, however, expand and elaborate them. It did that by making them the property of mankind rather than that of a peculiar and chosen people. But what matters most is that, with the triumph of Christianity, the new ideas became for a millennium the orthodox ideas of Europe. For good or ill, the Christian Middle Ages can never be erased from the history of political thought. And therefore, in that history there remains an indelible interrogation mark against the self-sufficiency of politics. It is probable that hence onward no amount of propaganda or conditioning will ever quiet succeed in convincing men that there is no higher law than that of the state’s, that individual men have no intrinsic rights, that patriotism is sufficient, that there is no tribute to be paid except for Caesar or that men belong solely to an earthly city.

Jesus Christ was a Jew, even if only on his mother's side. He was an heir, therefore, to the already long tradition of a people who had in a real sense made God their king, who had already suffered for not bowing the knee to any of the Gods of the Gentiles. Rome, like all other conquerors of Israel, had met in Israel the most implacable resistance to assimilation. On the fringe of Judaism there might be those, like the Herod’s or Josephus, who were willing to collaborate. But there remained a core of people who would take to the desert or even to the sword in order to escape the idolatrous abomination of emperor-worship. Besides, the Jews were less apt than other Levantines to look upon the emperors as deliverers or saviours. Their highest aspirations were not for peace at any price or for living in homonoia with other peoples. To make these their principal aspirations would have meant the selling of their birthright. They had been taught not to put their trust in princes, not to overvalue the material benefits which a prince supplied. They looked forward for a savior of their own, who would, it is true, restore Israel to a “kingdom”, but whose main function was a moral one, that of giving the Torah, the true law, to all peoples and obtaining from all peoples the recognition that was Jahweh's due.

By the time of Jesus’ birth, the Jewish religion had emerged victorious in the long struggle against Baal and Ashtaroth. That is to say, although the Hebrew religion, like most other, has in it a marked substratum of nature-worship, of the ritual observance of taboo undertaken to placate the dark powers who control fertility, yet the Jewish God had become pre-eminently for the Jews themselves, the god who demanded mercy not sacrifice. The Prophet with his moral fervor had pushed the Priest into a secondary role; and, therefore, the Law — Torah — had come to mean just dealings between neighbors even more than it meant complying with the niceties of ritual. Nevertheless, it was largely the ritual itself was only the outward badge of that sense of a community of brotherhood, which more than all else held the Jews together. Other ancient people had had to subdue and placate the forces of nature. The Jews were required to do more, for they had also to resist the hosts of Midian, which always prowled around them. No other people had been threatened so often with conquest or assimilation and, therefore, no other people developed such close social bonds or such exacting rules of conduct. Much of their sense of superiority to lesser breeds, by which they meant those without the law, was an almost priggish sense of moral superiority. And their God showed his superiority to false gods by being, par excellence, the God of righteousness.1 So much indeed had Jewish religion exalted and absorbed morality that even mystical experience, despite certain raptures among the prophets, was somewhat played down. Whatever else it was, Judaism was not another of the mystery religions.2

There was, of course, common ground between the ethics of the Rabbis and the ethics of the higher paganism. The great stoics Seneca and Epictetus would not have learnt less nobler moral precepts than their own, had they sat at the feet of Gamliel. Yet, there was a fundamental difference. For the pagan, “religion” meant, for the most part, either ritual observance or self-orgiastic rapture. Morals were related, for the Pagans, much more nearly to “philosophy”. For the Jews, morals and religion were so closely integrated as to be almost interchangeable terms. Jahweh, in being the god of righteousness, was, in this sense, almost unique among the ancient gods; and where the pagans strove to follow “nature”, the Hebrews strove to obey God. To follow “nature” is to follow reason; it is to do what the wise and good will themselves want to do. To obey God is to say “Thy will will be done”; and it may be obeying blindly, since God is inscrutable and may demand what is not neither intelligible nor natural to man. Did not Jahweh call for the sacrifice of Isaac and Jephthah’s daughter, and enjoin the savage absurdity of circumcision? He might even enjoin conduct that in man's limited vision appears neither moral nor aesthetic. Did he not command Hosea to commit adultery and Ezekiel to butter his bread with dong?3

To follow “nature” is also to do something which the wise man is capable of doing, for he himself is part of “nature”. But to obey God perfectly is to attempt to do what is impossible, since man, although created in God's image, is not God. Failure to follow nature is a mistake, but the mistake can be rectified by further effort. Failure to obey God is a sin which is irreparable, deserving wrath and requital or needing atonement and forgiveness.

Epictetus, admittedly, did at times adopt a theological mode of speech and did talk of obedience to a personal God, but he obeyed his God because his God’s commands were comprehensible and not beyond the understanding of wise men. He thought that it was possible “to be of one mind” with his God. Indeed, a philosopher could aspire to become more like a God than a man and “to have fellowship with God”. To disobey was merely foolish, since it led to loss of true happiness, which all men quite properly may seek, and which enlightened men quite easily could find.

The philosophy of Epictetus made its demands solely and singly on the individual. It was completely non-political, for it assumed that the philosopher could make himself independent of all external circumstances. He could still follow “nature” and display self-control, while his body was in chains or on the rack. His mind remained his kingdom, self-contained and self-sufficing. The God of Israel, however, though he had his reckoning with individuals, made men their brothers’ keepers and he had demands to make upon society. He might not spare Sodom, unless it contained enough righteous individuals, and he visited the sins of the fathers upon children and the sins of rulers upon their nations, allowing no man to be an island unto himself. Besides, his promise, while made to an individual, was to a chosen people. It was the promise of a “kingdom” and, therefore, was in some sense political as well as social. But it was a theocratic kingdom, in which the law was God’s law and not man’s, in which man’s first duty was to God rather than to any child of man.

Even in the Messianic kingdom of the prophecies it is Jahweh alone who is king. Thee Hebrew state in the days of its independence was always a theocratic state. And, when Jews became a subject people, they always thought of themselves as individuals of two allegiances, giving the first claim to their God. Three centuries before Augustine, the Hebrew Philo (of Alexandria) was writing of the two cities to which all men belonged.4

On the question of secular kingship biblical texts and Rabbinic teachings point in more than one direction. Samuel was shocked when the people asked for a king, since he deemed it a rejection of Jahweh’s kingship;5 nevertheless, Samuel anointed Saul and, in so doing, did much to foster the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Elisha might bestow his blessing on Jehu, yet Jezebel expected to deter the rebel with fear of God, when she asked: “Had Zimri made peace with [him] who slew his master?”6 Elijah may had run before Ahab’s chariot, when the king, for one, pleased Jahweh by sanctioning the lynching of some unsuccessful prophets.7 Yet Ahab was, to say the least, not unperceptive when he greeted Elijah with the word “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?”8

Broadly speaking, the king — even a Gentile king — was accepted as being ordained of God. It was a religious duty to obey him, unless he ordered something plainly contrary to God’s commands. Even if the ruler persecuted the faithful, the suffering he inflicted could be seen as an expiation for their sins.9 He was to be prayed for and sacrifices might be offered for him.10 Even for the Jew in exile the peace, which the king secured, was something to be thankful for and, without it, according to Rabbi Hanina, “men would have swallowed one another alive.” While Rabbi Honan ben Raba argued: “even an inspector of cisterns was appointed by Heaven.”11

On the other hand, Israel in the post-exilic period (from 445 BCE) was an ecclesiastical state, ruled in effect by high priests by virtue of their knowledge of the Law. The Law was the true sovereign and was supreme even over the prophets. Besides, whenever the Jews did have a king, he might be thought of as ordained by God, but he was in no sense himself a god, as were the heads of other oriental monarchies. When the Maccabean king Alexander Jannaeus (105-78 BCE) issued coins on which he styled himself their Basileus, devout Jews were outraged. They added in consequence a new and permanent clause to their daily prayer: “Be thou King over us, O Lord, Thou alone.”12 This had its echo in the Christian saying “For thine is the Kingdom”.

In a work produced early in the first century BCE, The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs — a book especially popular in the Galilee and the source of many ideas and phrases that later appear in the Sermon on the Mount — the Patriarch Judah is made to say on his death-bed: “My children... Love Levi... and exalt not yourselves against him... For to me the Lord gave the Kingdom and to him the priesthood... As the heaven is higher than the earth, so is the Priesthood higher than the earthly Kingdom.”13 Here is a claim for the superiority of Sacerdotium over Regnum, which is as clear cut as any made by medieval Popes.

Among the more sophisticated Jewish thinkers and seers, the expected Kingdom was not thought of as either temporal or earthly. It was thought of as something purely spiritual, a kingdom not of this world. Over and against the popular and more or less political conception of the Messianic rule, there was a school of thought which looked for only a spiritual coming of the “Son of Men”, spoken of in Daniel. It is surely significant that Jesus, in the Gospels, refers to himself by that name and never as “the Messiah”, which had far more political connotations.

Conditions in Roman Palestine were exactly those most likely to produce beliefs that were at the same time chiliastic and quietist. The country was grossly overpopulated and more grossly overtaxed — by Jewish priests as well as by Roman governors. Economic distress was very great and hoe of amelioration almost non-existent. The oppressed took refuge in doctrines that spoke of an imminent apocalyptic end to suffering. The world was so intolerable that God could not be conceived of allowing it to continue. Yet, so mighty was the oppressing power that no sane person could hope for its overthrow by human effort. Therefore, its overthrow could only be the work of God and spiritual spheres. Human individuals could repent and could be charitable to their poorer neighbours, as John the Baptist bade them. Nevertheless, the cleansing of the threshing floor must be left to God.14

But there were other Jews, more literal-minded or more politically minded; these were mainly thwarted patriots, looking for a Messiah, who would lead them to military conquest over the uncircumcised oppressors. It is clear that the enemies of Jesus associated him with this Zealot party and that among his disciples were disappointed Zealots, some of whom carried swords. Jesus’s preaching of a “kingdom” shocked the Rabbis as a seemed encroachment on the sovereignty of God. At the same time, it tarred him with the Zealot brush in the eyes of the secular authorities.

What is also clear is that Jesus was executed for a supposed offence against Roman Law. Crucifixion was essentially a Roman punishment and one abhorrent to the Jews. Had Jesus suffered for blasphemy at the hands of a Jewish court, the execution would have been by stoning. Besides, the two “thieves” are expressly called “two other malefactors” and expressly described as suffering “under the same condemnation”.15 Pilate was warned that clemency would show him to be no friend of Caesar’s; and the Barabbas episode suggests an atmosphere charged with political hysteria.

Long afterwards (c. CE 300) the anti-Christian Emperor Maximin Daia published what purported to be Pilate's official report, allegedly surviving in the imperial archives. The Christian apologists, especially Eusebius, charged the Emperor with forgery and claimed the document was blasphemous. But, since there were by that time Christian officials who could have exposed any such forgery, that charge can be legitimately doubted. That document, we may surmise, depicted Jesus as a political offender — a role which might appear more shocking to a third-century Christian than to our contemporaries, be they Christians or not.16

Jesus, without much doubt, was no political conspirator, although the accusation may be understandable. Nor is there in his teachings any explicit political doctrine. Nevertheless, his teachings contain inescapable political and social implications. Any discussion of what Jesus taught calls for extreme caution by subtle and peculiar difficulties. We have to remember that the teaching may be misrepresented and that one Gospel, Mark's (which is the earliest and most reliable), contains frequent statements made by Jesus that his disciples had failed to understand him.17 As Michael Grant once put it in a lecture at Tel-Aviv University, “the Evangelists were nearer in time, sprit and intention to Plato's ‘Socratic’ Dialogues than to Boswell’s Life of Johnson”, by which he meant that the Gospels are neither biography of the life of Jesus nor simply the recording of a master’s table-talk.

Above all, what is clear is that the gospel writers were certainly less concerned with the morality, which Jesus taught, than with what they thought he himself claimed to be. Their emphasis was by far more theological than ethical. To the earliest Christians what mattered were the Lord’s credentials as the prophesied Messiah and Savior, credentials better attested to by his powers and his works than by his precepts. Many precepts are indeed given in the Gospels, but they are often arranged or introduced in such a way as to draw attention primarily to the authority of him who gave them. What is often not mentioned is that most of Jesus’ moral teachings do not differ markedly from the accepted Rabbinic moral teaching. The gospels’ emphasis is not so much on what is said but on who saying it — “But I say unto you”. His teachings differ from that of the scribes, primarily because he is said to have taught with more authority.

Jesus to the earliest Christians appears to be not first and foremost a moral teacher or the revealer of new moral dimensions. In one sense, there seems to be something unhistorical and anachronistic in the modern emphasis on Christian ethics. As far as I can make out, its roots lie in Victorian idealism and humanitarianism. Whereas the modern Christian would say: “See how Christ raised human love to an infinite power and touched it with divinity”, the primitive Christian would more likely to have said: “See how God has manifested his power in the incarnate and in the risen Christ.”

Nevertheless, whether emphasized or not, the moral teaching is, of course, there. And in that teaching there is much implicit and some almost explicit talk about politics. Here again caution is necessary. Injunctions to rich men to sell their possessions, and even statements that the rich will be turned away or that Dives will fare less well than Lazarus hereafter, are not denunciations of private property as such. They are clearly more due to concerns for rich men’s souls than to concerns for poor men’s bodies. Jesus, as he appears in the Gospels, wanted to change people more than he wanted to change institutions. The Kingdom, he insisted, was within us. Property, in so far as it denounced, is denounced as a distraction, as something that leads us away from what is really important — that which is within us — not as something wrongfully withheld from others or as a wrongful basis of society. It should be noted that Jesus had rich friends as well as poor friends, and that he once rebuked a disciple who wanted to sell the precious ointment to benefit the poor “who are always with us”.

On the other hand, Jesus’ immediate disciples are enjoined to beg their bread and to have no property at all; the Magnificat speaks — perhaps not wholly metaphorically — of putting down the mighty from their seat; the Apostles held their goods in common and saw the death of Ananias as a punishment not just for lying, but also for keeping back part of the price of his land; St. James, who seems to have had much in common with the otherworldly Dead Sea sect, denounced rich men as oppressors and rebuked his brethren for not respecting persons.18

Again, it is not clear to what extent Jesus was, or was not, a pacifist. He used physical violence himself against the money-changers, allowed his followers to bear arms, and on one occasion bade them to sell their mantles and use the proceeds to buy swords.19 Jesus did not say that those who live by the sword shall perish by it. I am not aware of any occasion where he denounced the soldiers calling; and, what is more, there is more than one centurion who emerges with credit from the narrative of the Gospels.

Moreover, although the Christian is told to tum the other cheek to the smiter, nothing is said of what he is to do if his friend’s or brother’s cheek is smitten. Is he to offer his own cheek instead or to tum his brother’s other cheek? On this the Gospels are silent.

Further ambiguities arise with regard to the attitude of Jesus both towards Caesar and Caesar’s agents. Like his other Jewish contemporaries, Jesus used the word “publican” or “tax-gatherer” as equivalent to “sinner”, but he had publicans amongst his followers. This raises the problem of how to interpret his teachings on Tribute Money. It is usual to equate “Render unto Caesar” with St. Paul’s statement that “the Powers that Be are ordained by God.” But there are difficulties here. Jesus was asked the question by Pharisees, who held it unlawful for a Jew to pay Roman taxes — especially in coins bearing “idolatrous” images and words — and also by Herodians, who were in full cooperation with Rome. Jesus, presumably, had to avoid guilt by association with either party. An unwary answer would have embroiled him with either the Roman authorities or with the most zealot Jews. Taxation, moreover, was regarded as “tribute” extorted from a subject people, and therefore as a badge of servitude; as such, payment had been forcibly resisted by Judas of Galilee and the Zealot party.

The answer Jesus gave has to be taken in conjunction with two other passages. One is Matthew xvii:24-27, which contains a suggestion that only strangers (Gentiles) ought to pay tribute, that the Lord’s own “children” should be exempt and that payment, if made, should be made not as of right, but merely to avoid offence. The other is Luke xxii:1, in which Jesus is accused before Pilate of “forbidding to give tribute to Caesar”. The charge may not wholly be without foundation, since it is coupled with a charge that was at least partly true, that of claiming to be “Christ a King”.

A number of points with regard to Jesus’ answer are often overlooked. “Render” (apodote) means “Give back” to Caesar what is already his, namely, the mammon of material good, for Caesar is the lord of all mammon. The coin is Caesar’s, because it bears his image and superscription. Presumably then, that which is God’s and must be given back to Him, as that which bears God’s image, namely oneself — a man’s body, soul and all that in him is. It is the whole, and not just a part of himself and of his life, that a Christian owes to his God. A Christian cannot serve both God and Mammon. Some have taken this to imply that he can have no truck with money or material goods at all. And if he has no such possessions, it could be argued that he owes nothing at all to Caesar. Such, at any rate, was the view of Origen, who wrote: “Peter and John had nothing to render unto Caesar; for Peter says ‘Silver and gold have I none’. He who has no silver or gold, has nothing to render unto Caesar nor any cause for being in subjection to the higher powers.”20

There is no doubt that one strand in the earliest Christian teaching was anarchistic or antinomian. The Church is envisaged as a separate elect having no contact with material good or worldly power at all, owing allegiance to the Kingdom of God and to no other. At one time it appears that Jesus thought of preaching his gospel only to those “worthy” to receive it; by which I take it meant to devout Jews alone.

Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into the city of Samaritans enter yet not; but go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel... And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, who in it is worthy.21

It is also possible that the Saints, the “worthy”, were envisaged as having their own society wholly separated from the world, a society in which all secular distinctions, social rank and political authority ceased to exist

Ye know that the Princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them and they that are great exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.22

It is certain that the Saints were instructed not to make use of the secular law courts.23

The issue is further complicated because the earliest Christian ethical injunctions were undoubtedly intended to be part of an interim ethics; for it is clear that the primitive Christian was awaiting the coming of an imminent millennium. The first disciples lived in almost daily expectation of the Second Coming or Parousia and, with it, the immediate beginning of the “Kingdom”. Inevitably, therefore, the institutions of earthly society seemed of no major importance. The Gospel alone was of importance; and the Gospel had first to be “preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations. And then shall the end come.”24 The Saints in every nation must receive the signal that the Kingdom is near and they must be given the chance to gather together and await it. This eschatology governed all early Christian thinking and was only gradually abandoned. The first Christian generation naturally paid small attention to the secular world which, they believed, would disappear in their own lifetime. Any relations with that world were, they believed, but short-term relations. The relations that mattered were the relations of Christians with one another and with God. They had to make their peace with God while there was still time.

All this delayed the formation of any Christian view of secular society as such. The Christian’s duty to society was simply to prepare it for the Second Coming. Society as a whole could not and need not be revolutionized. All that society needed was the vital news, the Gospel. But the message was not for principalities and powers. It was for separate individuals. It was a case of let each man set his own house in order and await the Kingdom.

In time, however, as more and more Christians came to realize that the end was not around the comer, that the phrase “the Kingdom” might have another meaning that the Christian view of this world and of its values needed to be re-thought. And answers to questions like “What tribute was really owed to Caesar?” “Why was it owed at all?” and “What was Caesar for?” needed to be supplied.

From my reading of the Gospels, it is not clear that Jesus himself ever explicitely stated that Caesar’s power was ordained by God. His alleged remark to Pilate, “thou couldest have not power at all against me except it that were given thee from above”, is mentioned only in the Fourth Gospel25 and is in direct conflict with the two Synoptic Gospels, which agree that Jesus answered “never a word” to Pilate’s question26 “Art thou King of the Jews?” The Fourth Evangelist would have been familiar with the Pauline teaching on the Powers that Be and may have accordingly put it into Jesus’ mouth.

In one respect Jesus seems to have rejected Caesar altogether. The Saint, the full Christian, was forbidden to make use of Caesar’s judgment seal for settling disputes with other Christians. The civil courts were for use only in disputes between Christian and non-Christian, such as the disputes between Paul and those who persecuted him. There is some suggestion that if Christians became magistrates, they were liable for excommunication.27 The primitive Christian was required to shake the world’s dirt off his feet, to cut himself off from a world steeped in pagan idolatry and controlled Mammon of by other sinister or Satanic powers. It is clear to whom it was that Jesus referred to as the “Prince of this World.”28

Non-recognition of the state lingered long in the early Church. As late as CE 298 a Christian was executed for refusing military service.29 If this antinomian element in Christianity had not existed, it would be impossible to account for the implacable attitude of the civil powers. Tacitus had little love for the Principate and literally hated Nero. He was writing long after Nero’s fall and yet he said little against Nero’s treatment of the Christians, whom he clearly regards as the scum of the earth.30 Even the humane emperors Trajan and Hadrian admitted that self-confessed Christians deserved death, although they discouraged the use against Christians of delation and of lynch law. And why were Christians singled out for persecution, whereas the Jews, who were at least as uncompromising about emperor-worship, were at the time treated with comparative leniency?

Obviously, the Book of Revelation was not easy to explain away. Denunciation of the Roman state could hardly go further than it does in the Apocalypse, which also hints that the Christian seeks not only for “a new heaven”, but also “a new earth”. There are also other passages in the earliest Christian literature, which display an antinomian flavor. Clement of Rome, for example, recommended having no “respect for persons, no matter who they might be.” The “Epistle to Diognetus” characterizes lordship as “unchristian”. Similar sentiments were expressed both by Tertullian and Tatian. Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, asserted: “We [Christians] ought to obey God rather than men.” Tatian also claimed that, unlike paganism, Christianity delivered men from slavery and tyranny. The martyr Speratus said at his trial: “The Imperium of this world I do not recognize”. Some Christians claimed that they lived in this world as “aliens”, having their own city with its own law. The Christians true city, wrote Tertullian, was “Jerusalem the city above” and the Christian’s redemption by Christ made his [what?] “free from man”, “all the powers and dignities of this world are not only alien to, but they are also inimical to God”, “One cannot serve two Lords — God and Caesar”. The Christian has withdrawn from “the forum, the election place, the senate house”. He is “no lawyer, no judge, no soldier, no ruler”, “His only business is with himself.” He has no real intent with the “affairs of state”, the state of which he is, is not of this world. His prime concern, while in the secular world is, in one sense, “to get out of it as quickly as he can.” There was nothing wholly new in such an attitude, for it appears in the sects of the Dead Sea scrolls and in the writings of some of the Essenes.31

In spite of the legendary “Thundering Legion”, which served under Marcus Aurelius, which was allegedly full of Christian soldiers and was, therefore, saved from a great drought by a miraculous rain-storm, it is clear that many — if not most — early Christians refused to serve as soldiers.32 Christ, said Tertullian, “in disarming Peter, unbelted every soldier”, while Origen claims that they do Caesar better service by their prayers.33

There appears to be some substance in the complaint of the hostile mob at Salonika, who alleged that Paul and Silas were disloyal to Caesar and were preaching “First Jesus, second the Emperor (Basileus).”34 It was certainly a major cause of friction that the Christians referred to their master with words and titles hitherto used to refer only to the Emperor. Words like “Lord” (Kyrios) and “Saviour” (Soter). Then again, words like “Gospel” (Evangelion), “Advent” (Parousia) and “Epiphany” were adopted from the litany of emperor-worship.35

However, from the beginning there was another strand in Christian teaching. The world, while it lasts, is real in some obvious sense. It has its own order, rules and laws and, possibly, its own rights. The disciples might be told to beg their own bread, but somebody is needed to bake it. The world, therefore, has its uses and requires some recognition. Even if “the Prince of this World” is the Prince of Darkness, his activities were, to say the least, tolerated by the Christian God.

In the Gospels no worldly officer, no ruler, no centurion is rebuked for following his calling, though an implicit exception might be made in the case of tax-collectors. On the other hand, nowhere, save in the doubtfully authentic remarks to Pilate reported in the Fourth Gospel, is it suggested that people engaged in secular pursuits are doing anything for God. In the Gospels the Christian is continuously told to love and pray for his persecutors, but he is not told that his persecutors are doing God a service.

In St. Paul’s Epistles, however, a new concept seems to be at work. The Powers that Be are not merely tolerated by God; they are positively ordained and positively God-appointed.36 The author of the First Epistle of St. Peter enjoins submission to authority, but specifically attributes to the institution of government a human (anthropine) origin.37 It was St. Paul who first gave government divine ordination.

The explanation of this change is manifold. St. Paul, in the first instance, was a man of the world, who must have seen that Christianity could not become a world religion, the faith of Gentiles, as well as of the Jews, unless it comes to some sort of terms with the world. Moreover, he was writing — perhaps in CE 52 — before Christianity had become a proscribed or persecuted religion. Next, St. Paul was an ex-Pharisee steeped in the Rabbinic teaching, which saw in the divine plan an appointed place for the secular order and for civil government, and so required the good Jew to be a good citizen.

But there is a further explanation, subtler and much more exotic. It is increasingly recognized that Pauline theology is highly mystical and esoteric, that St. Paul set himself a peculiar problem and solved it in a particular way. Neither the problem nor the solution had been dreamed of in any previous philosophy, but through them St. Paul gave to the whole of Christian thinking a permanent and indelible stand, so much so that contemporary Christian theologians are still arguing about its implications. Nevertheless, some writers often fail to give sufficient weight to the fact that most of the Epistles are older than the Gospels and that the Gospels themselves are not wholly free from Pauline colouring. A non-Pauline Christianity, if ever existed, is now virtually irrecoverable, and so extremely difficult to even conceptualize.

What mattered to St. Paul was not the life of Jesus but his death and resurrection. The God, Paul proclaimed, was a God who had suffered and survived a disgraceful public execution, and in this fact Paul saw both the whole crux of history and the whole hope of mankind. The Pauline gospel was par excellence the gospel of the cross. Paul felt that the crucifixion was of stupendous and even of cosmic significance. For him, it was at once a scandal and a triumph, as it was “the means of grace” as well as “the hope and the glory”, and so it bought both redemption and salvation. But a triumph over what and salvation from what? Over and from sin, undoubtedly, and over and from death. But also over and from something else. “For we are not contending against flesh and blood but against principalities (archai), against the powers (exousiai), against the world-rulers (kosmokratorai) of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

Because of man’s disobedience and fall, the world ceased to be under the direct rule of God. The world was ruled, with God’s acquiescence, by a hierarchy of unseen, daemonic elemental “angel powers”. These spirit forces, though sinister and, strictly speaking, ‘Satanic’, were not in the full sense powers of darkness. There were more “daemons” than “demons”. I remind you, that at time I am speaking of, Satan had not yet grown his medieval horns and tail. The Satan of the Jewish tradition, in which Paul was reared, was the Satan of the Book of Job. That is to say, he is still an angel, though a fallen angel; he still does God a service; he is the great Accuser, prosecutor, the slanderer not unlike the part of the “Devil’s Advocate” in the Catholic Church’s procedure of canonization. He is an agent of heavenly justice who can punish, and justly punish, men’s breaches of the Law. We are in his power so long as our salvation is made on a mechanical and meticulous keeping of the Law. And to be delivered from him, we need to be delivered from having to win salvation by a law-abidingness impossible for sinful men. In late Jewish thought, the Law was held to have been dictated to Moses not by God himself, but by angelic or daemonic agents. In Pauline thought, the Law and its agent Satan are inextricably bound together and, Paul thinks, it the work of Christ’s Atonement to have delivered us from both. People can be saved now by the new processes of Faith and Love, by abandoning all trust in any law-abiding Merits of our own, by casting themselves wholly on the Merits of Christ, which alone suffice to counter and to cancel the Prosecutor’s charges.

It is in this context that Paul’s doctrine of “the Powers that Be”, especially in Romans, xii, needs to be considered. The word used for Powers, “Exousiai”, is used in all Pauline contexts apart from one [Titus, iii:1] denotes the elemental, cosmic “angel powers”, the daemonic “earthly-rulers”, who were the real agents of crucifixion, and also the powers over whom Christ’s victory has been won. But these are powers of the spirit world at least as much as they are earthly.

In Romans, xiii, reference is being made undoubtedly to the secular power of Caesar, but even here an ambiguity is present. The rulers, who are a terror to evildoers, have at least some affinity to the Satan who accuses the transgressors of the Law. Origen later on was to talk of the Daemons, who may be used by God “in the capacity of public executioners”. I would like to draw your attention to the passage in the Gospels, which tells the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness. Here dominion over the temporal world is offered to Jesus by Satan. What is particularly important to note is that the passage leaves no doubt that that dominion was Satan’s to give. In Luke’s version, which probably shows some Pauline influence, Satan adds specifically “for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.”38 It follows that, if an early Christian called Caesar the ordained of God, the ordination must have been thought of as somewhat indirect. Caesars immediate commission must have come from Satan.

There is also reason to believe that neither Jews nor early Christians thought of all heathen gods as completely nonexistent. Many were seen to be false gods or evil gods, daemons or demons, but not as completely fictional entities. This is reflected in the long-held belief that every nation had its appointed tutelary angel.39 The Christian resisted emperor-worship partly for this reason. If he worshiped Caesar, might he not be worshiping the daemons or demon, the angel power that presided over Rome?

As belief in an imminent Second Coming grew fainter and as Christianity spread amongst the educated in the Graeco-Roman world, much of this Hebraic apocalyptic began to be sloughed off. Christian thought began to acquire a more Hellenic or, rather, Hellenistic tinge. Besides, many of the early apologetics were addressed directly to Emperors or to other high Roman officials. It would have been neither politic or tactful — in some instances not even intelligible — to tell such persons of the dark elemental “powers” who stood behind them. Then again, it should not be forgotten that a relationship of some sort between political power and the cosmic order of the universe was by now a common place of pagan thought. It must also not be forgotten that every Christian apologist in Rome was at pains to point out that Christians prayed for the Emperor and for all constituted authorities, who, according to the Epistle of Barnabas, represented God. This, perhaps, was difficult to square with a belief in a Satanic basis for all such authority.

Inevitably, a more matter of fact interpretation of St. Paul’s doctrine came to be adopted. Towards the end of the second century CE St. Irenaeus expressly denied that the phrase “the Powers that Be” in Romans, xiii, meant supernatural or angel powers, although he admitted that other Christians (possibly, Gnostics) had long been in error on this point. Irenaeus was the first well known pillar of respectability produced by the Christian Church, the first great Christian who displayed that he possessed what would become to be known as the mind of a bureaucrat. He supported instinctively any established authority — the Pope’s, the bishop’s or the magistrate’s. Even the Gospel was not proof against his ingenuity. Satan might claim, in St. Luke’s text, that world dominion had been given to him. But Satan, said Irenaeus, was a liar and, therefore, what he said could not be true. All power, Irenaeus argues, is of God. Men need coercion because of their sinful nature; and even sinful rulers can be used by God to correct or restrain kingly arts.”40 Christian political conservatives for centuries did little more than restate and amplify these Irenaean arguments.

With the onset of respectability, Church doctrine slowly, but surely, steered away from Hebrew mysticism and Hebrew eschatology. Their place was gradually taken by concepts borrowed from the Stoics. The process was begun by Paul himself. His sermon at Athens, though possibly a fabrication on the part of whoever wrote the Acts,41 was obviously a bid to win the Stoic vote.42 Nor was it possible for Paul to preach his cosmopolitan gospel without drawing on the Stoic doctrines of the brotherhood of man.

It might be thought that a gospel of human brotherhood, a gospel, claiming that in Christ there is “neither bond nor free”, would have led to an assault on slavery. In fact, nothing of the sort happened. As long as the Second Coming was thought imminent, earthly economic status was not thought to matter. It seemed obvious that a bondage confined to the body in a transitory world would soon be superseded by a freedom of a wholly different order in a purely spiritual kingdom. St. Paul, when he sent Onesimus, the runaway slave, back to his master Philemon, made no suggestion that all men being set free by Jesus in quite another sense — of all men being equals in God’s sight. Actual slavery is treated as an irrelevance, a “thing indifferent” in Christian life.

This Pauline doctrine was soon adopted by the Church. Christian slaves, wrote Ignatius to Polycarp, should not be “puffed up; but rather let them be subject to the glory of God, that they may obtain from Him a better liberty. Let them not desire to be set free at the public cost, that they become not slaves to their own lusts.”43

Nevertheless, the humanitarian and even antinomian strands in early Christianity were not wholly or even permanently lost. It remained clear that, in any conflict of allegiances, God came first and Caesar second, that “we [men] ought to obey God rather than [other] men.” The seeds of conscientious objection were thus ineradicably sown. It also remained clear that, in the last analysis, what really mattered was the individual soul; that, if secular authority demanded something endangering the soul, then secular authority must be defied. The Christian might be a dutiful and loyal citizen; he might think the state be divinely ordained; he might recognize the state can and does perform essential work for Man and God. Yet the Christian qua Christian must always think of himself as a member of something more important than the state. He belongs to the state, but he also belongs both to God and to the Church. The state can do much, but it cannot save souls and it is, henceforward, expected to leave space for those people and organizations which can.

Furthermore, Christianity did supply the first reasonable explanation as to why the individual “mattered”. He mattered for the simple and obvious reason that he mattered to God. He mattered because of his immortal soul, which could and should be saved. True, the Stoics were groping towards such a view, but their pantheism hampered them. For the Stoics, an individual’s soul was merely a fragment, temporarily detached from the world soul. Christianity — much more markedly than Socrates or Plato — made each individual’s soul really his own. It assigned to each individual person a separate and unique soul, which would remain his permanently, still separate and unique, even after death. Besides this, stoicism in effect restricted enlightenment (the Stoic form of salvation) to the wise. The mystery religions of the ancient world restricted salvation to the initiates, which more often than not meant the rich. Christianity implicitly asserted that all men mattered and that they all mattered equally. The strong did not matter more than the weak, nor the wise more than the foolish. In one sense, the good did not matter more than the wicked, since God was infinitely grieved over the loss of any single soul. And had not Jesus said that he had “not come to call the righteous but [rather] sinners to repentance”?

Because of emphasis of Christianity on the individual, two Cambridge professors in the middle of the last century claimed that all liberal ideas derived from Christianity.44 This is both unfair and not true. Some liberal ideas derive from the Rabbis, some from the Stoics and a few from Epicurus. It has been argued that Socrates and some of the Sophists were in some sense liberal. What is undoubtedly true is that Christianity helped a number of liberal ideas and concepts survive, and that some liberal concepts have taken on forms that make little sense outside of a Christian context. It is also true that Christianity provided a more forceful or, at any rate, a simpler case for liberal values, a case which ordinary men could understand more readily than the rarified subtitles of every previous philosophy and Rabbinic Talmudic dialectics. For all these reasons, modern liberalism often uses, without acknowledgement, what are basically Christian arguments. It could also reasonably be argued that there would not be a liberalism today had there never been a Christian religion. But this, I suggest, is a purely unfounded observation without historical basis and/or any moral or philosophical implications. I say this, because it is equally true that there could have been no Christian religion, had there not been a Jewish religion before it. And it is seldom — if ever — argued that no man has a right to be a Christian unless he first becomes a Jew.

Then again, although the germs of liberalism were always latent in the bloodstream of the Church, they were always liable to attack from powerful illiberal antibodies, which were also present. If the church has nurtured conscientious objection, she has also preached “obedience for conscience” sake. On the issue of slavery the churches as a whole remained illiberal for almost 1800 years. On other matters many Christian churches remain Pauline and illiberal still. It would, however, be unjust to St. Paul, if I failed to mention that, although he viewed the Powers that Be as ordained by God, he also viewed them (at another level) as the instruments of Satan.

It is no less important to remember that Christians have always thought of Satan as being on the losing side. When, eventually, the expectation of an immediate Second Advent disappeared, the Christians stepped into another part of the Jewish Inheritance: the belief that God was at work in history and that good must ultimately prevail. Despite much over-emphasis on Faith, neither Charity nor Hope was wholly ignored. Pagan philosophy had become fundamentally pessimistic. Christianity, for all its low estimate of human nature, did not altogether despair. Man was redeemable and man was loved by God. In the long run the universe was certain to end satisfactorily, because it was working out the will of God: and the satisfaction was not looked for exclusively in an after-life. Sometimes this led to fatalism, but sometimes it produced attempts to work with God, to bring his Kingdom nearer. It would lead to impatience, to the cry “How long, O Lord, how long?” Without such impatience and without such cosmic optimism, Christian philanthropy might well have grown cold. But it continued to hope and therefore to endure.

Over the years there has been much Christian preaching against the folly and wickedness of loving man more than God, of doing things for man’s sake and not for God’s, of believing that men could and should improve their lot without reference to God. On balance, such preaching has done much to prolong injustice, cruelty and suffering. It has also done much to bolster up the Powers that Be. But it has not quite obliterated a more fundamental layer of Christian gospel. If God is all men’s Father and if God is Love, it must be wrong for Christians not to treat all men as brothers and, for them, not to love their neighbours and their enemies. No Christian can wholly avoid seeing that his religion implies a “social gospel” — a “social gospel” which requires social reforms, whether or not the Powers that Be approve them. Further, the Christian has Jesus’ own authority for thinking that the way to serve God is in fact to serve men: “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of my brethren ye have done it unto Me.” Though neither history nor logic requires the Christian to be liberal, Hope and Charity require all Christians, in the broadest and best sense, to adopt a liberal attitude in their dealings with all other men, Christians and non-Christians alike. Unfortunately, many Christians have not always adopted such an attitude and especially to my people. But that is a topic for another lecture and for another lecturer, but I am sure that the late Father Daniel O’Hara would think it more than appropriate for a Christian, and especially a Catholic, audience to listen to a lecture on that topic.

Haim Marantz taught for many years in the Department of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. He has worked and written extensively (and continues to do so) in the area of Political Thought.

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