Summary
1. In the Beginning . . .
The modern idea of God, the theistic narrative we would be familiar with today, can be traced back to the Middle East some 14,000 years ago. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Canaanites all founded their own systems of faith and ritual around this time. This complicated and vast religious growth was a response to what the ancients viewed as the unsolvable mystery of existence, variously called mana, numina, jinn: the occupants of the unseen spiritual world. Initially, the central figure or High God was seen as the “Great Mother” or “Sky God”: Inana to the Sumerians, Ishtar to the Babylonians, Aphrodite in Greece. Smaller deities, like her children, and stories emerged to explain humanity’s struggle on earth, but there was no separation, ultimately, between human life and the sanctified gods. As power shifted in the Oikumene (civilized society), the old ways of the maternal God with her various emanations made way for a father God, a jealous, warring deity and a conception we recognize in the Bible’s Yahweh. This occurred around the Axial Age (800–200 BCE), and had contemporaneous parallels in China and India where Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism began to flourish in their own way. In response to Greek and Arab philosophy, and as societies changed, agriculture predominated, and the noble and merchant classes arose, a new explanation was needed to bind society together, and the various religions and cults began to move toward the acceptance of a single, monotheistic God, rather than a Great Mother flanked by her many subdeities.
Need to Know: God has a long history, going back to the dawn of mankind and to preagricultural society. There being no scientific or empirical method to explain existence, life was generally felt to be imbued with mystery.
2. One God
During the Axial Age, the major religions of our time took shape. In Judaism, perhaps the oldest of the world religions, this begins with Isaiah’s witnessing of the appearance of the God Yahweh, who announced, for the first time in recorded history, that he was not only the “god of armies” but the God of the entire world. Other gods must not be worshipped any longer (though they still existed and competed with Yahweh’s preeminence). At this time, the concept of compassion also entered religion. Inner change for God was expected, as well as outer demonstrations of faith (sacrifice, ritual, etc.). Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Amos, and Moses are seen as enforcers of the terribile and fascinans (terrible and fascinating) power of the new God, which is transcendent and inexplicable unlike the other gods, which were familiar and known actors in the human world.
At this time, Israel was the only kingdom promoting faith in Yahweh; other kingdoms remained pagan, since it was easier and less politically and morally demanding. With the changes brought about by historical events, such as the conquest of Babylon by Persia in 539 BCE, the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) were written, rewritten, and edited to accommodate the new faith and the circumstances surrounding it. Greek philosophy influenced the early Jews and many of the ancient Greeks merged faith in Yahweh with faith in Zeus. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria emerged in 30 BCE to attempt to explicate or rationalize a synthesis of Jewish faith and Greek philosophy.
Need to Know: The move toward Yahweh, as opposed to other gods, was a political project as well as a spiritual undertaking, to be obtained through immense struggle, sacrifice, and denial of the old ways of human overlords and kings.
3. A Light to the Gentiles
Jesus Christ was a little known mendicant in northern Palestine, a Jewish child from a well-off family who began to wander, preaching and exorcising demons as many Galilean faith healers did at that time. The four books of the New Testament give very different and often contradictory accounts of his life and deeds. Not much is known, in fact, about his actual existence or exact teachings, since the Bible was often edited or rewritten. Nevertheless, disciples began to pray to Jesus from very early on. One of his main doctrines appears to be the belief that non-Jews (goyim) could be welcomed in Israel even though they did not worship Yahweh, which was scandalous at the time and led to his crucifixion by the Romans. Jesus also represented a personalized relationship with God.
After the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written (within one hundred years of Jesus’s death), St. Paul became the first and most important Christian writer, evangelist, and thinker. Much of early Christian faith overlaps neatly with Buddhism: concepts of sacrifice, personalized god experience, and the notion that an ordinary human could participate in divinity. By the fourth century CE, Christianity’s impact was being felt as more than a fringe cult belief system, and had become fully separated from the Jewish faith (from which it originated). Some important early Christian thinkers were Plotinus (205–270 CE), Origen (184–253 CE), and the gnostic Tertullian (160–220 CE). Christianity, in the early centuries of the Common Era, was hotly debated by scholars, statesmen, devotees, and philosophers—leading finally to the series of crises discussed in the next chapter.
Need to Know: The event of Jesus, historically speaking, and his teachings were not perhaps as momentous then as we make it out to be today, and certainly not as important as what came later. His final persec...
