Spring fever has hit me more intensely this year than it has done in some time. The explanation is simple: just as spring was arriving, I was allowed to open my door to it — the balcony door. As you can see, the balcony is not much to look at yet, but that’s not the point. The open door is the point. (The open door is remarkably unphotogenic.)

It was too chilly to spend time on the balcony this weekend, which was just as well, since there is only one chair out there at the moment, but I spent almost every minute reading, quite as if I were taking a holiday in the fresh air. I went back and forth between two books, Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, which I haven’t quite finished, and Geza Vermes’s Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea. I hardly know which is more sensational.

I don’t recall what pointed me to Vermes’s book. (I really must learn to make a note of such things.) The dust jacket is a bit waffly, identifying the author as “the first professor of Jewish studies at Oxford,” but not clarifying that this is his current post. He has certainly written a number of other books on early Christianity, and he is a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls. An air of controversy hangs over the pages of Christian Beginnings.

My critics complain that I rejected the authenticity of the passage from Philippians because its Christ picture did not agree with my theory. As a matter of fact, I argue against its Pauline origin on the grounds that it does not fit into Paul’s understanding [sic] of Jesus, as reflected throughout all his genuine letters and in particular in his numerous prayer formulas and doxologies.

But the book is thrilling to read. Step by step — chapter by chapter — Vermes shows, on the evidence of Scripture and later well-known writings, the transformation of the charismatic healer of Galilee into the Second Person of the Trinity. Claims for the divinity of Jesus, Vermes argues, are not even hinted at until the Gospel of John (written some time after Paul’s Epistles), and do not appear unequivocally until the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written about 110. Even then, the details of this new theology took a further two centuries develop, with the “orthodox” view erupting in Alexandria in 318, in the clash between Arius of Libya and two successive bishops, Alexander and Athanasius. It interests me no end that this fight over the nature of the Trinity boiled over almost as soon as it was legally able to do so publicly — it was only in 312 that Constantine reversed the persecution of Christians, beginning the process that would transform an illicit sect into the state religion. It was at Nicaea, the first ecumenical council of the newly-recognized church (325), that the Athanasian view became established dogma. This did not prevent the Visigothic kings of Spain, for example, from adhering to the Arian view until they were extinguished by the Moors in the 600s. The Arian formula insisted on the understanding of Jesus’s subordination to God the Father that had been common, if not quite universal, right up to the beginning of the Fourth Century. Only after Nicaea was Jesus proclaimed to be consubstantial with, and co-equal to, God.

So, Christian Beginnings is in large part a history of “Christology” — the nature of Jesus qua Messiah. Other matters are discussed — the virgin birth, the Second Coming, the meaning of the Eucharist — but it is the gradual deification of Jesus that interests Vermes most. Vermes isn’t neutral about this. He closes his book with the hope that a new reformation will restore Christians to the “pure religious vision and enthusiasm of Jesus,” at the expense of “the church attributed to him.” Once upon a time, I’d have found a book such as this one to be shocking as well as thrilling, even though I myself have never been a believer, because it “exposes” Roman Catholic orthodoxy as a fabrication cobbled together by men who never knew Jesus and who dealt in a cavalier fashion with the Hebrew scripture that Jesus never repudiated. (The first chapter does a fine job of establishing the charismatic tradition in Judaism, “alternative,” but never altogether unorthodox.) But I find that I have outgrown the shock.

Granted that the Church’s claims about its divine origins are bogus, there remains the rather amazing history of the institution’s expansion over the course of four centuries. Although contentious, the early church was necessarily not on the offensive, and its administrators gradually assumed the secular burdens of a fading empire. How did that happen? Clearly, men and women found meaning in Christianity. But Christianity, as Vermes shows, developed meaning as it grew. I think that it is unreasonable to talk about a settled Christian doctrine as existing prior to the death of Augustine in 430 — at the earliest. And it was at just about that time that the embrace of a nascent European aristocracy began to warp ecclesiastical priorities.Whatever becomes of the Church in the future, its role in European history is clearly a leading one, and the roots of Western civilization in its modern phase are entwined in its teachings. Conversely, the Church is not eternal, but as historical as any other work of mankind.

I found Christian Beginnings to be an easy-to-read exposition of a patiently-made case. For anyone who wants to read the New Testament by its own light, the book is indispensable.

***

Armadale is the third of Wilkie Collins’s four “sensation” novels, and arguably the least successful. It has been too long since I last read The Moonstone or The Woman in White, the two that remain on college reading lists, for me to make comparisons, but I can say that No Name, which I read last year, has the advantage over Armadale of an irresistible heroine for whom no reader can fail to root. What we have in Armadale, in contrast, is the fast friendship of two men who, unbeknownst to one of them, bear the same name. There is a superb villainess, Lydia Gwilt, but she takes a while to appear, and we don’t get the lowdown on her career until well past halfway. The two men are complete opposites, and both somewhat  irritating. One is amiable but thick and bull-headed; the other is inclined to morbid superstition. The extracts from Lydia Gwilt’s diary, which dominate the latter part of the book, make for much more appealing reading. In fact, Miss Gwilt is an anti-heroine for whom it is difficult not to root.

The satisfaction of Armadale, however, is that of each of the big novels: a rich variety of voices and characters. I don’t know why anyone bothers with Dickens’s paper-doll creations when Collins, with a few bold strokes, creates such ferociously realistic figures as the bedridden and insanely jealous Mrs Milroy, whose complete lack of grounds for doubting her husband’s fidelity simply excites her mad capitulation to the green-eyed monster. Collins’s people are excessive, but they’re never implausible (although there is something dubiously virginal about the young men at the center), and sentimentality is beaten back by cheerful cynicism. The plotting (and counter-plotting) is engrossing because we care about the plotters rather more than we care about their victims.

I can’t wait to see how it all comes out in the end — so, you’ll excuse me.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, April 22nd, 2013 at 7:05 pm.