The Jesus movement remained geographically and mentally within Jewish confines. In Rome, for example, the Way followers lived in the Jewish slums and, through anti-Roman riots, appear to have caused the expulsion of several Jews from the city in AD 49. As the years passed and the preacher failed to return in glory, his followers remained few in number–at most several hundred throughout the Empire–and still almost exclusively Jewish.
The Way looked set to remain at most a minor faction within Judaism, or more likely to die out completely. Then something very strange and unexpected happened. In the mid-to-late 40s AD, a new preacher and a new message erupted on the scene, probably in Antioch. The new man started life as Saul, born into a wealthy Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Tarsus in Cilicia, part of what is now Turkey. His family owned a business supplying large marquees and tents to the Roman army, and Saul became a Roman citizen. Tarsus, like Antioch, was home to a large community of Hellenised Jews, who would have been familiar with the views of thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria, who sought to fuse Jewish theology with Greek philosophy. Saul appears to have been a deeply religious man, initially a conventional Pharisee, and perhaps participated in a crusade to hunt down followers of the Way.59 But at some stage, possibly around AD 33 or a little later, he had a mystical experience in which he saw a vision of Jesus, who commanded him to ‘proclaim him among the Gentiles’.60 Thereafter, Saul renamed himself Paul, and he began preaching his new faith around AD 45.
Unlike James and the other Apostles, Paul almost certainly never knew Jesus the man. Nor did he seem to care much about what Jesus had said or done in his lifetime. Paul was the first person to write anything about Jesus, in his long and influential letters to the Jesus house-cult groups in various towns, the first of which were written around AD 50–1, ten or twenty years before the first Gospel was penned. Yet, in all his surviving letters, there are only half a dozen references to the life or words of Jesus. Instead, Paul claimed a direct line to the risen Christ for himself, transforming the Way into a completely different faith. He turned a minor Jewish sect into the first universal, non-tribal religious movement. In complete contrast to Jesus and those who had known him in the flesh, Paul marketed the religion primarily to Greeks and Romans.
Furthermore, his message was stunningly original. He blatantly repositioned the Jesus movement in Greek terms. For Greek philosophers, the cosmos resembled a super-mind–nature made sense, and as men understood more about the world, so they came closer to God. As Xenophanes said, ‘The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us, but in the course of time, through seeking, men find that which is better.’ Paul took the incredibly daring step of elevating Christ to near equality with God, a move that compromised the monotheism of Judaism and the Way, and took two or three centuries to become generally accepted among Christians. Paul was not interested in the historical Jesus, but in Christ as a mythological symbol, Christ as the way for individuals to connect with God and receive God’s love, grace and power. The living Christ, Paul said, made all the difference–now men and women could use Christ’s divine power to improve their lives. They could live in God, and God could live in them.
This was an exciting new world-view, blending the appeals of Jesus and the Jewish prophets to become better people with the Greek view that men could share in divine nature. And as a further incentive to adopt the faith, Paul added the immensely beguiling idea that Christians–even those who died before Jesus returned in glory–would live for ever in heaven with God.61 This promise of eternal life, and the avoidance of eternal damnation, became increasingly appealing as time went on and the kingdom of heaven did not appear on earth.
Paul also invented the extraordinary concept that the death of Christ on the cross was necessary for God to forgive man’s sins, turning a terrible accident into God’s most sublime plan, an epoch-making demonstration of the Almighty’s love for mankind. It was not necessary for people to become good in order to be saved; on the contrary, only the grace of God could save anyone, and that grace could be made available only through the crucifixion of Christ. This bizarre thesis, the ‘Crosstianity’ wholly original to Paul, was at odds with the traditional Jewish view, which Jesus himself clearly held, that Yahweh was a God of mercy who was willing and able to forgive sins long before Jesus had lived and died.62
The grandeur of Paul’s poetic vision, however, was that Jesus had instituted a new form of humanity, and reconciled everyone if they believed in Christ, giving unity to the world and freedom to all believers. ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek,’ Paul wrote, ‘there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’63 Paul was the first person to propose a universal faith that could unite different nationalities, connecting people through a common currency of belief and behaviour. It would be wrong to credit him with any intention to create a better civilisation, since he shared the Apostles’ belief that Christ was about to return in glory at any minute, wrapping up human empires and indeed all life on earth. Nevertheless, Paul unintentionally created a network effect, which became ever stronger over time as Christ’s return was ‘delayed’, the number of Christians grew, and their influence in Roman and later Western society became progressively greater. Eventually, with the religion becoming almost universal throughout Europe as nearly everyone joined the Christian network, its moral code spread and society improved, on the whole. For sure, by modern standards, medieval Christianity had some glaring ethical flaws. But when one compares it with Roman civilisation–in which the citizens were an exclusive minority, subject peoples and slaves were harshly treated, and crucifixions were routine–some progress had certainly been made.
Jesus’ followers had adhered to all the traditional Jewish rites and rituals–circumcision, the cultic food requirements, the synagogue, and so on. In line with the new non-tribal faith, however, Paul insisted that they must all be unceremoniously dumped. He also used Rome’s transport and communications network to spread the religion, and started new Christian hubs–groups of people in each town who met in one another’s homes, and became what Paul called the ‘church of Christ’ there. The Romans ruled through a network of road and sea connections around the Mediterranean, with each large town linked to the others and to Rome. Paul travelled incessantly between them–like someone spinning plates in sequence, he lectured, corrected and condemned (he found much to dislike about many of the new Christians), established new churches and restructured others–all in a whirlwind of activity that involved multiple shipwrecks and imprisonments. This frenzied preaching only ended, as far as we can tell, with his execution in Rome in the early sixties AD.
Through sheer force of personality, a startlingly original message, inspirational speaking and writing, and full exploitation of the existing Roman network, Paul eclipsed the people who had worked directly with Jesus. His brand of Rome-and Athens-friendly Christianity grew rapidly and prevailed. Before him, there were only a few hundred followers of Jesus. By the time of his death, there were many thousand. By AD 200, there were perhaps two hundred thousand Christians; and a hundred years later six million, a tenth of the Roman population.64 In AD 312, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it Rome’s official religion. Today, there are nearly two billion Christians world-wide, more people than follow any other religion.