ABSTRACT
The story of Israel’s slow and sometimes traumatized movement toward a doctrine of monotheism is not the only source for eventual Christian development of the One-God idea. Nor is that history the only source for later Jewish or Muslim developments of the idea. In fact, although Jesus and his immediate followers were almost all Jews, and it is said of Jesus that he was well-schooled in the Torah and prophets, and Paul (as Saul) was well-known as a learned Jewish leader, there is another tradition strongly at work in the beginnings of Christian monotheism that cannot be separated from it or, for that matter, from the Judaism of first century Palestine. That tradition is Greek philosophy, a tradition whose principle concerns for logical coherence and abstract ideals were well integrated into the dispersed intellectual circles of the Mediterranean world by the time of Jesus’ life and death. In the five centuries between the return of the Jewish leadership to Israel
from exile in Babylonia and the reported birth of Jesus in Nazareth, the Persian empire with its sophisticated Zoroastrian monotheism gradually gave way to Greek rule and cultural ascendency, an ascendancy most commonly associated with the warrior emperor Alexander, tutored by Aristotle, whose final victory over the Persians at the battle of Issus ushered in the Hellenistic age. Of course, by the time that Jesus was born, Greek rule had given way to Roman, but not before the largely anti-intellectual, militaristic Romans absorbed much of the Greek language, ideas, and theological interests. Given the power of the Greek heritage in the Roman empire and the heavy influence Greek philosophy had begun to have on
Jewish thought, it is not outside of the ballpark to suggest that, by virtue of the success of Alexander’s empire in laying an essentially Greek foundation for the education of upper-class males throughout the region, their own philosophical notions of divinity and their own brand of monotheism were as deeply stamped on the early Christian theological imagination as those of the Second Temple poets. To be sure, later Christian associations of God with Greek ideals of immutability, purity, and the intelligible realm of spirit and mind are as inextricably woven into the theological fabric of Christian thought as are the more personalistic notions of father, warrior king, judge, and protector so foundational to ancient Jewish imagination. Therefore, just as it is important to avoid casting overly Christianized ideas of God backward in the attempt to understand the impulses at work in the emergence of Jewish monotheism, it is important to look also at the ways in which the notion of oneness became such a basic part of Greek thought long before the Christians arrived on the scene. For social or political minds tempted to find causation where there may
only be correlation, it is a tantalizing coincidence that, at roughly the same time that the Jewish leaders were in exile and faced with a most profound turning point in their theological understanding of the God of Abraham and Moses, another impulse toward monotheism was taking shape in Greece. Here is the tempting similarity: in both contexts war and the changing sweep of empires made hash of former theological systems that had legitimated former social and political arrangements (and, in the continuous feedback loop of theology and politics, the breakdown of social and political arrangements further eroded the legitimacy of former theological systems). In both contexts political life had become intolerably inconstant with consequent deep wobbles in the cultural traditions that gave meaning to the whole fabric of life. In both contexts the local gods were proving impotent against invasion and conquest. In both contexts, at roughly the same time, political trauma correlates with theological innovation toward ideas of cosmic divine unity. Unlike the Jews in exile, however, the Greeks did not begin with a
roughly coherent ethnic deity whose power, legitimacy, and location was threatened by forced separation. For them, the issue was more one of diminishing legitimacy and coherence among the family of gods who, above the banners of rival armies, increasingly competed and clashed across the volatile Greek world. It wasn’t the grand drama of exile but the ongoing petty plays of local city-states at war with one another under a confusing and apparently often changing array of local gods who themselves seemed to swing between allegiances according to the fortunes of local warlords. Their sixth-century situations were not entirely the same, nor were the theological solutions that Jewish and Greek elites contemplated. Forced exile on the one hand and prolonged civil war on the other can engender different traumas and (still flirting with causation) engender different innovations in the theological realm. Intriguing similarities
exist here, particularly from the vantage point of theological hindsight. From out of the multicultural broth of imperial expansion, both the Jewish elite in exile and Greeks in the conquered Asia Minor territories sought to resolve the question of divine plausibility in the face of violent political and cultural flux by contemplating a divine One beyond and apart from the smoke and stench of defeat. Like all people, the ancient Greeks were a complicated mix of contra-
dictory characteristics, which they generously passed on to their Roman conquerors. On the one hand, Greek popular religion thrived on the messy soap operas clogging the divine airwaves and so tolerated high levels of inconsistency and even of contradiction in the identities, stories, and capacities of the gods. On the other hand, Greek intellectual life became increasingly obsessed with coherence and demanded that ‘‘the truth’’ tolerate no contradiction or inconsistency whatsoever.3 This seems to have resulted in a growing secularization in upper-class public and intellectual affairs, or at least an increasingly nominal cultic dimension where gods were invoked more or less out of habit, or for the purposes of public display. This emergent Greek focus on theory and coherence could have been in
part the result of the feuding city-states, where competition between local communities and petty rulers was played out in actual warfare, but was also channeled into less violent forms of dispute between scholars (not to mention the narrative dramas of jealous rages and covert alliances among the entailed gods). In any case, local deities kept proliferating as the Greek world expanded through commerce and relentless warfare, and the divine life depicted by the epic poets seemed increasingly to confuse matters. For example, in a later polemic against Greek religion, the early Christian apologist Theophilus gives some indication of the potential for religious confusion across the Greco-Roman world, albeit from a prejudiced perspective:
I shall inquire of you, O man, how many kinds of Zeus there are. First there is Zeus called Olympian, and there are Zeus Latiaris and Zeus Kassios and Zeus Keraunios and Zeus Propator and Zeus Pannychios and Zeus Poliouchos and Zeus Capitolinus. Zeus the child of Kronos, who was king of the Cretans, has a tomb on Crete; the rest of them were probably not considered worth burying.4
