Yet, observe that his later fight with these same Jewish-Christians over the issues of circumcision and Kosher diet soon made him their enemy once more. We are left to wonder: was his conversion and association with the group he once persecuted designed from the start as a means of infiltrating them, sowing division, and undermining their devotion to the cultural hostilities that made rebellion so attractive?
We had long considered this to be the likely reality before the publication of Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman Intelligence and the Birth of Christianity by Thijs Voskuilen and Rose Mary Sheldon in 2008, and here the reader is directed to this work for the complete case. These authors go so far as to argue that Paul was himself a Roman intelligence operative, an agent provocateur engaged in a dangerous psy-ops campaign against the rebel “Christians.” (45)
In stark contrast to Paul’s message, his opponent James warns in a letter ascribed to him that the Father in Heaven “does not change like shifting shadows,” (46) and emphasizes that one must not “merely listen to the word” but also “do what it says.” (47)
Lacking documents known with certainty to have been written by them, it is difficult for us to know the details of the ideology or ideologies of the contemporary Jewish-Christians. And yet, apart from the problematic work of Josephus that we will discuss in Part II, the sectarian documents of the Dead Sea Scrolls (whatever the date of their composition) and this letter ascribed to James may be our best sources.
James seems to retain the contemporary Jewish idea of purity, urging his readers “to keep from being polluted by the world.” (48) James also insists that, “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” (49) In what seems to be a direct contradiction of Paul, the author asks, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? … [F]aith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” (50)
Icon of James the Just
James challenges less devout Jews with the notion that mere belief is not enough: “You believe that there is one God. Good! [But] even the demons believe that—and shudder.” (51)
While James urges “peace,” it is not at all clear that he means more than an internal peace among fellow Christians. “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” (52) James almost seems to threaten the Jewish establishment itself, which was then cooperating with Rome: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you…” (53)
We see in the authentic letters of Paul, written before the Gospels, that the New Testament records a struggle between two types of “Christians”—well after Jesus had settled these disputes, according to the later Gospels. (54) Like Paul, James faces ideological foes within Judaism. Yet unlike Paul, James’s conflicts seem to be with the “enemies” of the Scrolls community—not with the Scrolls community itself—starting with the Roman-collaborating Jewish establishment.
The dispute between Paul and James as recorded in Galatians disturbed St. Augustine so much that he wrote to the respected early translator of the New Testament, St. Jerome, asking: how could the Apostles be in such heated disagreement? (55) Even during the reign of the Emperor Nero, decades after the supposed death of Jesus, Paul is telling us that this same conflict is still raging. Paul’s group was amenable to the wider pagan world while James’s group was violently opposed. Why was this happening after the advent of Christ?
We can now see the answer to this enigma that seemed insoluble to St. Augustine: in the 1st Century there were two different kinds of Christians. One advocated peace that flowed directly from a lax view of the Torah’s requirements while accommodating Gentiles in harmony with Roman governance. The other advocated a hardline to preserve religious tradition and identity, and, in all likelihood, necessary opposition to Rome.
Now the references to troublesome “Christians” or to the followers of “Chrestus” by the ancient sources can be readily identified: they were not referring to the Christians we know today, requiring us to believe a bizarre scenario of irrationally sadistic Romans unjustly persecuting peace-loving Christians. Instead, these historical accounts refer to their religious rivals, who opposed Rome and who are shown clashing with Paul in the New Testament itself.
The Church’s solution for why this amnesia about Jesus’s ministry occurred in Paul’s time has been to hypothesize that after the Crucifixion the disciples must have undergone a “Judaizing” retrenchment. Those who followed Jesus’s revolutionary mission reverted to previous ways. Other scholars ignore or minimize the heated quarrel between Paul and his “Christian” rivals, including Paul’s outright damnation of them.
Yet, if Christians had somehow returned to traditional Jewish practice, surely Paul could have just cited Jesus himself on these matters to settle the matter. But Paul does not. Instead, decades after Jesus’s alleged ministry, he repeatedly emphasizes that he received his own gospel from no man exclusively through personal revelation.
From all of this, it is far more plausible to believe that the relevant Gospel material did not yet exist. Paul’s adherents must have written it later as a demonstration of Pauline theology, giving his innovations the authority of Christ himself in order to trump Paul’s contemporary “Jewish-Christian” opponents. This is the only conclusion that explains all the evidence, including the fact that the writing of the Gospels is dated to the Flavian era, after Paul’s writings and after the first Jewish War. (56) As a direct result of that war, Paul’s ideological foes were dead or in hiding, leaving only “Pauline” Christians still standing.
Now we can understand why Christians who followed the Gospels never seem to have been subjected to much persecution by the Roman government. Why would they be?
According to the early Christian apologist Tertullian, who lived in northern Africa at the turn of the 3rd Century, certain Roman governors of Africa actually intervened to secure acquittals for charged “Christians” (who were by this time almost exclusively of the Pauline varieties; surviving Jewish-Christians by then had taken the sectarian name of “Ebionites”). Sometimes these officials refused to bring charges against Christians, at all. (57) While there were a couple of other local places and governors where we do know that New Testament Christianity was attacked, notably at Lyon and Vienne in 177 CE and later during the persecution that commenced under Diocletian in 303 CE, these appear to be brief exceptions to the Romans’ rule.
Therefore, we can be reasonably certain that there was no cause for early Christian iconography to disguise itself in order to avoid persecution by Romans in the 1st and 2nd Centuries. The true purpose of using the symbols we started our investigation with, the identical dolphin-and-anchor motif used by the Emperor Titus and the early Christians, may well have been exactly the opposite.
Roman persecution of Christians, rare as it was, would all come to an end with the “Edict” of Milan in 313 CE, when Constantine the Great began legalizing Christianity shortly before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.