The opinions stated here are mine: I do not speak for any organization or tradition. I engage in a type of historical speculation that allows me to explore various answers to some of the world’s great historical questions that otherwise have no answers. There is no agenda here to make history into convenient propaganda for any group of people, and no desire to denigrate anyone’s personal beliefs. While truth is always my goal, I have no facts to offer, as I am not in a position to find or collect them: I can only collect rumors and stories.
Your comments, corrections, and questions are encouraged.
I haven’t seen very much, if any, information regarding the relationship between Constantine and either Eusebius (of Caesarea or of Nicomedia). The most detailed information found so far was within one of the Constantine biographies I read last Winter. Intimations there was that the Eusebians were the Katzajammer Kids with Constantine when they were all in Rome.
So how did they end up in his court? E of Caesarea says that he “saw” Constantine when the latter was in Syria in the court of Diocletian. But does that mean that one observed the other from some distance, or that they had shared lengthy conversations?
The reason this has interest to me is in the question of how Syrian-Hellenic Messianic theology, and a big chunk of the Hebrew bible, got co-opted into Constantine’s ego cult. We’re told that both Eusebii were trained by “Christian” theologians, but given that this is unlikely, we might speculate that they were trained by distinct, Hellenized Jewish schools and combined this with the other “Mystery” school initiations they had encountered.
But how did Constantine find these guys? Did they petition him for recognition? Were they referred by trusted advisors? To what degree was the inclusion of Jewish material Constantine’s idea? How much of it existed simply to ridicule the Jews? Was there a culture-wide recognition that the Jews had some sort of monopoly on divinity, or were they chosen to ridicule because they had caused so much trouble?
Tags: constantine·eusebius
I’m starting to become overwhelmed (again) with revising my understanding of 1st-4th Centuries CE. On one hand, I can still clearly point to the council of Nicea in 325AD and say that this was the place at which Constantine (re-)created Christianity. On the other, I’m completely befuddled regarding which characters were real and which were not, and which words were really written by which real person.
Credit should be given to Constantine for being a brilliant military and political strategist. His education is what many aspire to as “classical”; his tactical tutors were the best; he practiced with real armies against real enemies and became a sterling general. His ambition was equally great. But he was not a man of letters. He was not a philosopher. He was a man of action, and of decision. Although I give Constantine credit for “creating” Christianity, this does not mean that I think he was clever enough to make it all up, but that through his force of will, he was able to co-opt and redefine existing systems to his own ends.
Recently, I found myself stalling out on the research front. I could trace the movements of the larger groups of Jews and various Jewish derivatives from the Second Temple until the 7th Century. Likewise, the development and movements of the myriad Eastern and Mystery cults into the Roman Empire from its founding until the 5th Century could be shown on a map. I speculated that the urban areas with the largest groups of Jews and Hellenized mystery cults would be the places where a sychretization like Christianity could have naturally developed.
Again, until recently, my understanding was that the term “Messiah Cult”, “Mystery Cult” and “Christianity” were all roughly interchangeable during the 2nd and 3rd Centuries, such that Ba’alism, Mithraism, Manichaeism, Serapis worship and Jesus cults were all under the same umbrella. This understanding came from a study of Roman persecution in the first 4 centuries of Empire, in which I discovered Imperial ire to be placed on mystery cults other than Jesus worship in almost every case.
The irony is that I had felt certain that within the history of persecution that I would at least get some sense of how the early Church interfaced with the Roman state. Once I realized that there was almost no actual history of Christian persecution by the Roman state, I began to flounder — what was I missing? And now I have it: I was missing the identification and motives of the real authors of the New Testament.
With the meme of the previous three posts in my head, I’ve been able to work my way out of my rut. Let’s assume that some or all of the New Testament was either entirely made up or misappropriated from other sources and heavily redacted, in Rome, sometime between 311 and 323CE. The questions now become: who were the editors and what were their sources?
PRF Brown suggested Eusebius of Caesarea, author of the first book of Christian History, as being the primary, if not the only, author of the New Testament corpus. I think that it would have been a lot of material for one man to have written in such a short span of time. Rather, I’m beginning to see a team of conspiratorial scholars working at the behest of Constantine.
Our man from Caesarea is still on the list, but with him, I’ll be adding Pamphilius of Casearea, who apparently introduced the Hebrew scriptures to Eusebius, but also worked with him to create a defense of Origen’s work on the Old Testament. Also added is Eusebius of Nicomedia, who was the primary Bishop at the sides of Constantine and Constantine II and who baptized Constantine I at his death.
It’s not clear how much men like Jerome and Epiphanaeus, who wrote after the council of Nicea was a done deal, were aware of the actual history previous to that council’s actions, so one cannot be sure if they were deliberate in their attempt to paint a Christian gloss over history, or if they were simply unable to see history without it.
Regarding the sources, it’s easy to assume that our team of hack writers simply made a lot of it up as they went along. So much of it is reflective of other material, that it’s easy to see how bits of elements common in all the other traditions could have been gathered up for use by the Eusebiuses. Since so many of the real cults and traditions were destroyed in the decades following the establishment of Christianity, it is difficult to imagine what might have been present. One wonders if there had not actually been some Jewish messiah cults that had influenced Eusebius — what were they and what did they teach?
We are told of two predominant “schools” of Christian theology — one in Alexandria and one in Antioch. Alexandria was famous for its many schools of philosophy, and the Alexandrian school was the host for some of the greatest minds of the early Church and the development of allegorical exegesis of biblical material. The Antiochan school preferred a literal exegesis… but there’s scant little evidence of its impact or students. Lucian of Antioch — about whom we know nothing — was supposedly the instructor for Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius, Maris, and Theognis.
To demonstrate how much easier things are with the expectation that much of the early church history was simply made up by Eusebius, we can understand the school of Antioch as simply a foil to an equally imaginary Alexandrian school and be done with the endless lists of imaginary deans. Eusebius had the education and exposure to made a very nice Christianity. It really seems like the simplest explanation for a lot of it.
Many questions are still unanswered. Did Eusebius write the Gospels from scratch, or did he draw from other sources? What about the Pauline epistles? Were those legitimate communications in any way, or based on a set of legitimate communications? To what degree did Eusebius plunder the works of existing cults to populate his own?
Tags: constantine·early church·eusebius·persecution·roman empire·theology
Since discovery of PRF Brown’s site[], I have burned a good many hours both reading and thinking. It’s clear that the “Eusebian Fiction Postulate”[] has forced me to re-examine what I thought I understood about early church history. I have been relatively pleased, so far, to find that it seems to make more sense, given the facts as we have them, than any other theory.
Most of the “Introductory Articles” posted on the site are recommended reading. The first few do a remarkable job of demonstrating the impossibility of an historical Jesus. Some discussions about the Roman Empire and specifically about Constantine is followed by some rather pointed information about Eusebius. And then the historical documents follow for quite some time. I’m looking forward to working my way through his archive.
This chronology built a depot in my head and sent fully loaded trains of thought out on on the hour. Brown helpfully created this chart which summarizes only the destruction of literature indicated in the chronology. I was first struck at the horrific destruction of culture over two centuries of documented, state-funded terrorism against Hellenic culture. I remembered my recent studies of Christian persecution in the first two centuries, when I discovered that almost every reference was either vaguely referenced or had been proven to be late interpolations of earlier material. There is, on the other hand, a confident quantity of proof that there had once been Hellenic temple cultures and schools of philosophy from before 300 BCE, and that these were all no more by 500CE.
Another train of thought considered how much of the time before 325 is hidden from view because of Constantine’s flames and Eusebius’ pens. Polluting the pool of historical documents with propaganda and lies is bad enough, but incinerating all incriminating documentation puts a fine point on us not bing able to ever uncover the whole truth. There is a very significant shadow that Christianity throws onto the historical record that clearly begins with Constantine, and doesn’t seem to have a single reliable reference beforehand. Unfortunately, due to the efficiency of the Roman Empire, we have only shadows.
One thing that I’m not entirely clear on, and perhaps he isn’t either, but it seems that Brown places fully into the lap of Eusebius the authorship of the Gospels, Acts, many letters, and most of Origen’s New Testament commentary. Possibly, I’ve misread his material and he may attribute more or less to Eusebius, but you get a clear sense of scale nonetheless. I still hold to the theory of an historic continuity of a Nazarite tradition from the 1st Temple period through to the Roman occupation and expect that some of their materials made it into Eusebius’ works.
The notion that Paul/Saul emerged as antagonistic, and then latter supportive, of a community set in this tradition had been my source understanding for his epistles. Now that I have to ask whether it was Eusebius, instead, I find less reason to hold up Paul’s letters as ‘real’ — but I still anticipate that a Nazarite community did exist, largely from Torah references. The question of whether Paul/Saul was even real should be addressed. His names are clearly abbreviations of two popular names: Apollonius and Solomon. As in, he was like Solomon when he was persecuting the “early Church”, but then he was like Apollonius once accepting them. This seems really contrived, but this measure alone is hardly convincing.
New train, now departing: the deep and rich irony of using ’synchretism’ to explain the traditional understanding of the development of Christianity is shockingly clear to me now. “Synchretism”, as a force that traditionally impels minority religions to accept political authority from majority faiths, was the modus operandi for the Roman Empire whenever they allowed Eastern cults to operate within its borders. That is, if a new faith could demonstrate how it was essentially like, and would accept direction from, an already accepted faith, it would be allowed in as a subset of the previous faith. I’m beginning to suspect that the notion that the Greeks did all of it derives from the flaming anti-hellenic crusades of the early Church.
Here is another thing I saw only dimly before very recently: the primary actions of the Roman Empire to dominate the religious world, after the adoption of Christianity, were focused on decimating Hellenic culture. The other culture I’ve been studying recently that had a strong conflict over varying degrees of Hellenism was, of course, Judaism. I understand now how easy it would have been to take a few legends here, a few traditions there, and co-opt a (or create a new) rebellion tradition to define a New Truth for the whole Empire in which Hellenism is the Great Evil. I’m sure, now, that the selection of Byzantium as the new capitol was chosen in order to be close enough to squash all things Greek, while monopolizing trade from a unassailable fortress.
Arianism now takes on a whole new light, if one must discard Eusebius as a source, what more can be said about them? We know that the cult was mostly spread in the Western Empire, based in Rome. Some biographies of Constantine that I have read stated that Constantine began as an Arian and eventually moved to his position at Nicea. If, as proposed by Brown, Constantine released ‘version 1′ of Christianity to Rome and the Western Empire first, before bringing it to the East, it is possible that Arius was an intiate of that early version of Christianity.
Knowing Constantine’s hatred for those who might upstage him, and his invective against Arius, I would expect that Arius may well have became personally popular and was receiving the adulation the Emperor wanted for himself. This in itself may have sparked the need to refit the entire enterprise with written texts and a strict hierarchy, thus the “New Testament” and the re-release of the faith in the East: to ensure that the Emperor, not the priesthood, received all the glory.
The very delicious and cruel comedy of the entirety of the New Testament can be fully appreciated now. The Romans had destroyed the Judaean state, and now made that destruction the central memory of the new State Faith. The stories are told with a straight face, yet when one is ‘in’ on the joke, it becomes plain how the Jews are being shown as fools, thieves, brigands, and charletans. Suddenly, the rush to live ascetic lives in distant hovels as far from civilization as possible, even migration to Persia, makes a lot of sense. Who wouldn’t want to get as far away from the madness of the Roman Empire as possible?
Now I’ve got a whole new list of figures to (re-)investigate:
- Apollonius of Tynea — referenced as having begun the Essene movement
- Origen — to see the difference between Old and New Testament commentary
- Mani — the Prophet of Manicheism
- Arius — just what was it he was preaching, anyway?
- and that list of destroyed temples — just who were those people and what were they up to?
Tags: bible·constantine·early church·eusebius·faith·greeks·judaism·paideia·paul·persecution·politics·roman empire
I just got pointed to P.R.F. Brown’s amazing site. He has posted quite a bit of research to his site — including a few projects I had started myself and am right glad I don’t have to finish them, now, like the list of all known writers in the ancient Western world, categorized and dated. Whew!
Brown uses his web space to defend his thesis: Constantine the Great invented Christianity. He defends this pretty well so far, and appears to still be truckin’. His primary thesis, alone, is a good read and successfully summarizes the material on the site. If you want to get into the detail of how this or that thing happened, he has certainly got the detail for you.
Loyal readers will know that I had already come, more or less, to this conclusion. What I had not done that Brown does do, is focus closely on Eusebius (Pamphilus of Caesarea) and return with the opinion that he had forged the majority of the New Testament single-handedly. Further, Brown postulates that this was done as per the direction of Constantine in the years before Constantine took control of the Eastern half of the Empire.
Brown tells a fascinating story about how Constantine had his spies (specifically, his episkopos) systematically record the priestly hierarchies of all of the (Hellenistic) temples in the Eastern empire. When Constantine defeated Licinius, he called the heads of all these temples to Nicea for a little chat alongside his Western Bishops. There, he declared that a new religion was formed and anyone who wanted to join would be promised power and wealth and those who declined would be immediately hacked into small pieces. Subsequently, the new royal priest class formed at Nicea established a jaggernaut that even another Emperor[] — only 40 years later — was completely unable to derail.
Again, what’s best about this site is the incredible amount of detailed, scholarly work he has published here with the clear intention of having others follow his work and challenge it. This is now one of my resources.
Tags: constantine·early church·eusebius·roman empire
Two famous biographies are here summarized to make a point about a significant problem in the art of archaeology. The question is whether one can even determine if the character of some ancient story actually lived when all you have are the written records that tell the story.
My first subject has defined an entire school of investigative research, and has been frequently been given credit, by his example, for the general improvement of police detective work since the 19th century. There is copious written material describing the man, his works, his methods, and his environment, all unquestionably published at a time contemporaneous with the events recorded. The histories provided are unquestionably about real, verifiable places and set in the appropriate time, with no recognizable anachronisms. There is even video proof of the man and his methods. Interestingly, something of a hero cult has even developed over the years regarding this English gentleman.
Naturally, the person I am speaking of in this case is the fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes, created out of the genius of Arthur Conan Doyle. The video proof is obviously that of the various imposter-actors who have worn the fabled cap and coat. The “historical record” was simply Doyle’s regular column in the Strand Magazine. That and all the hundreds of books of commentary thereon, written since Doyle struck his last tittle. The thing about the hero cult is no joke, nor is this fictional character’s impact on real-life investigative professionals in any way illusary.
My second subject was a national treasure and an object of devotion. He was the modern Prometheus in every way, ushering America into a brightly-lit and musical century of a somewhat smaller world. Acres of press and dozens of biographies were written about the man in his lifetime, and we have many hundreds of confirmable photo, video, and even audio recordings from inventions made by the man himself. It is a much harder task that I had expected to say anything relevant about this exceedingly famous personage without immediately giving away his identity.
But even for a verifiable and famous personage like Thomas Alva Edison, there is easily as much mythology about the man as there was history. For example, everyone knows that Edison invented the light bulb. Except that he didn’t. Light bulbs already existed before Edison turned his attention to them. What he did do was put some of the resources at his “invention factory” in Menlo Park towards systematically discovering the best material to use as the “filament”, or the burning part of the bulb.
What this means is that several (perhaps dozens) of low-paid physics students did painfully tedious experiments with hundreds of sample materials. For weeks, these experiments were conducted until the very best materials were found. And the cheapest was used to create abundant and cheap light bulbs that made Edison yet another fortune and crowned his glory. And the students who actually did all the work? Mostly forgotten.
Most curiously, although the man certainly has his modern fans, there just doesn’t seem to be a generalized hero cult about the man that existed in his lifetime. Much of his genius is now seen to be a skillful combination of media manipulation and patent farming. Admirers of competing inventor Nikola Tesla (who does seem to have an active hero cult) have done some good work knocking away some of Edison’s shiny exterior. Although it was Edison’s own silly obsessions that weighed the most against him, ultimately dragging down his reputation toward the end of his life.
These two examples show the problem pretty clearly. We have great heaps of written materials that frequently appear to be valid from the context of their own times. We’ve made movies about the people talked about in these stories, so there are many who think they’ve seen the true stories of their lives. Many think they know what these people should look like, how they spoke, even what they believed. Whatever truth may lie at the bottom of all of this is lost in a miasma of ideology and politics.
How are we to know when a famous person really existed? Holmes and Edison were contemporaneous — even Holmes’ stories started coming out when both men were roughly the same age. Someone who lives in a time or a place where they might miss the point about Holmes being fictional might really wonder about this. Had Holmes and Edison played chess together? Might they have gone to school together? Once the existential questions are set aside, mighty struggles can then ensure speculating this interaction of that. What about The Seven Percent Solution, in which Holmes turns to Sigmund Freud for help in kicking his cocaine addiction? This even comes from a distinct source — doesn’t this prove that Holmes existed?
So what if we tried to avoid the vagaries of ego and hero and attempted to look at larger groups and measurable activities? Okay. Let’s make it really easy and look at something as modern and American as apple pie and Fahrvergnügen: baseball. The origin of baseball is easy, right? Everyone knows Abner Doubleday invented the game in a cornfield near Cooperstown, NY, in 1839.
Except that he didn’t. Doubleday was a remarkable man, and a true American hero. He was a West Point cadet who served faithfully in the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and in battles against native peoples. He wrote many books[] and none of them even mention baseball. He never spoke of it, and as far as we know: he never played it; he never even watched it. For a man who had as little to do with baseball as he had to be credited with its invention took an act of bravado by baseball club owners interested in making the game seem more “American” (some years after Doubleday had passed on).
Credit for the establishment of the modern, American game of baseball is credited (by no less than the United States Congress in 1953) to a certain Alexander Cartwright for his Manhattan team, the Knickerbockers. Cartwright published his club rules in 1845, and these became the basis for the rules used today in professional and college leagues all across America. But Cartwright did not invent the game, which had been played, in various forms and incarnations, by young men and women throughout the colonies from the earliest times. Forms of ball-and-bat games are discussed in medieval European documents, and possibly derive from games played by pre-Christian Celts as part of Spring fertility rites.
Several lessons here:
- Things get out of hand really fast. It’s easy to forget how much of what we do today has been done about the same way for thousands of years, with only some of the pattern changing a little in the last century.
- Pointing to the origin of a group activity is like nailing jello to the wall. People use what advantages they have at hand and this changes how they do things, like play games. People have been playing games for as long as there have been people, so we can assume that many of the “best practices” for such activity had long before been worked out before the first milkmaid protected her dangling stool from flying turnips[].
- People can be strangely possessive about their national mythos, so things like mentioning that baseball wasn’t invented here can really upset people. No doubt getting into things that are actually packaged and distributed as “religion” will dutifully stir up emotional distractions, as well.
- Finding out what really happened with something is possible up to a pretty limited and modern point. Before that, it’s all a lot of speculation. This is rarely the result of a conspiracy, more often it is simply another example of the tendency for people to forget.
To put a fine point on it: Holmes, Edison, and Doubleday were all significant personages 125 years ago and today the legends they have collectively inspired have distorted the truths of each. The language in which their original stories were written is nearly the same one we speak today, with very little variation. And yet we are still unable to clearly distinguish fact from fiction. The stories of the Bible were written two and three thousand years ago in dead languages that had been translated through other dead languages into predecessor languages of our own. Not only were the original and intervening languages different, the cultures, the worldview, and the size of the world was very, very different when most of the stories of the Bible were first written down. Life before and life during the Roman Empire were very different things for most peoples — life afterward was as unimaginable for the people of those days as life before the Roman Empire is to us. Little wonder we struggle today with the ancient materials of the Bible.
Tags: anachronisms·anthropology·concepts·post-modernism
At the root of Judaism is a written history of people to whom Yah has spoken. These people, we are told, had direct, immediate, and personal knowledge of God. They spoke with him. He answered. His words became the driving force for their actions.
This is exactly the sort of individual congress with the divine that the Gnostics are always going on about. This simple fact makes it very difficult to see “Gnosticism” as some sort of external antagonizing force, but instead a natural component of Judaism, and subsequently, in Christianity.
Although there are some characteristic patterns, the relationship between Yah and His people changed over the centuries. The interactions were different. People became more familiar, and He became less generous and more demanding over time.
Abraham[] only has to move near to Yah’s neighborhood and he gets the providencial jackpot. While Yah’s jealous tendencies are first revealed to Jacob[]. By Moses[], Yah not only has specific tasks to perform, but a whole slate of rules and regulations that must go along with His worship.
Solomon[] was the last of the Kings to be called. It was all about honor to Solomon and how things are Really Going to Go His Way Now. The other callings in the Torah fall upon the Prophets, and these calls were of a functional type experienced by Moses. Samuel[] gets a message, Isaiah[] gets a blessing and Ezekiel[] gets a snack: all are required to communicate their sacred message to the peoples of the Earth.
Jonah[] and Jeremiah[] both express immediate dissatisfaction with their tasks, but Yah can be very convincing when He needs to be. Again, their messages were in line with those of Isaiah and Ezekiel, even if their own enthusiasm, at first, was not comparable.
In the Gospels, we are told by Luke and John that John the Baptist was called by God[], but we don’t really get to see the initial encounter, like we do with Paul and Ananias in Acts. Paul[] is called by Christ, who has not a message to the world, but a personal one to Paul[]. Ananias, on the other hand, gets a command to action from Yah[] — in the Mosaic style — to perform a highly contrived ‘healing’ on Paul.
You can see some of the Judaic traditions of Yahwistic calling in the few examples provided us in the New Testament, but it’s clear that these traditions had evolved over time, if not partially forgotten.
Tags: abraham·bible·concepts·gnostic·judaism·moses·patriarch traditions
Two significant news items regarding some really old writings.
The first is the Revelation of Gabriel, which is a singular slate of stone covered in ink, using an ancient hand. Although the piece has been in a private collection for years, only recently has the text been translated. Dr. DeConick has a handy index of relevant web sites concentrating on this item. My initial overview of the available material was disappointing, however, as so much of the original has smudged away.
The second is the absolutely thrilling news that the Codex Sinaitica is going to be made available — both scans of all of the pages plus translations — online by the end of next year. Beginning Thursday, we are supposed to have access to the Gospel of Mark from the Codex.
Tags: bible
Philip occupies a rather unusual corner of the canon. On the one hand, he’s one of the first people Jesus recruits[] and he’s shown recruiting other apostles[] as well as bringing the early Church to Samaria[]. On the other hand, he’s very much a bit part: he does not appear as a significant actor in the passion play, and the Synoptics almost completely ignore him.
John plays Philip up quite a bit. We get four significant scenes with the man and we get to see a number of very interesting details, both about Philip, but also about the character of Jesus Christ. Again — this is a character that is merely listed as “present” in the other three Gospels and mentioned a few times[] in Acts. To have him frame the presentation of Christ to the world in John is really quite significant.
When we first meet Philip[], Jesus has made a special trip to Galilee to call upon him. Philip turns around and Calls upon Nathanael, about whom discussion will later ensue. The next time[], Philip is serving in some capacity as treasurer when time came for Jesus to ask how they would pay for enough bread to feed the crowds that followed them. This prefaced the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
Philip is the advocate sought out by a gaggle of Greeks[] who seek out the Christ. Philip informs Andrew and both inform Jesus… who then gives a speech predicting his death before he hides himself from the crowd[].
Finally, we get the confrontation between Philip and Jesus[]. The scene is a component of the Passion sequence, right after Christ has announced to his Apostles that he will soon be gone. Some of the Apostles basically ask Christ for a few extra answers before he goes: Peter, Philip, Thomas, and Judas Iscariot. Jesus upbraids them all.
It is not at all clear that the Philip in Acts is the same man as the one in John. Other than three brief mentions in Acts[], the scene in Acts 8 is Philip’s one major part. Acts 6:5 mentions a Philip (the Evangelist[] )being named as a traveling witness, designated in charge of recruiting more disciples. And we’re told that after the persecutions began in Jerusalem, Philip went down to Samaria and began his ministry there.
He met a receptive audience and soon had the crowds in a frenzy. We’re told that a local prestidigitator was able to whip up the crowds pretty good, but once he heard Philip’s message, he, too, was immediately baptised[]. Philip does so well, Peter and John go down to Samaria to do the laying-on of hands trick, which apparently this Philip wasn’t savvy to[].
After returning to Jerusalem, he rides in a carriage with an Ethiopian eunuch on his way to Gaza and converts him on the spot. They stop at a random watering hole for a quickie baptism, following which Philip is snatched up physically by God and placed in another city[]. I don’t know of a single similar episode anywhere in the Bible to compare with this singular miracle.
So, who was Philip, anyway? We’re told twice by John that Philip was from Bethsaida. This meagre fishing port on the north end of the Sea of Galilee was enlarged and renamed by Philip the Tetrarch, Herod the Great’s son by Cleopatra of Jerusalem. Philip the Terarch built a pagan temple in his capitol city, Caesarea Philippi at the source of the Jordan River, to rule the regions of southwestern Syria and the Lebonese mountains he controlled[].
Mark & Matthew helpfully tell us about Philip the Tetrarch in the context of the story of the death of John the Baptist.
For Herod himself had sent and had John arrested and bound in prison on account of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, because he had married her.[]
Unfortunately, Philip the Tetrarch was married[], not to his niece, but to her daughter, Salome, who danced for Herod and demanded the head of John the Baptist on a platter[]. Luke provides us with a more complete political picture, but speaks of John being in prison, without mentioning his demise. John says nothing about the Baptist’s demise.
Naturally, there is no one drawing this out in detail in the canon, but let’s put together what we do have. We have at least three Philips here: the Apostle of John, the Evangelist of Acts, and the Tetrarch of the Synoptics. Although a casual reading might connect the apostle to the evangelist, it seems more likely that the Apostle was the Tetrarch, and that the evangelist was a second-generation Greek follower.
First, both the Apostle and the Tetrarch had a known connection to Bethsaida. Second, Philip was the one Jesus asked about paying for bread for a multitude, so maybe he had some cash. Third, when a group of Greeks from Bethsaida come to worship, they seek out Philip — a known ambassador of their kind.
An argument that the Evangelist was not the Apostle was the fact that real Apostles had to be called in to bring down the Holy Spirit. Presumably, Philip the Apostle had undergone the same training and experiences as had the other Apostles, and so should have been able to baptise with the Holy Spirit. Also, if the Evangelist was also the Tetrarch, it would make little sense to evangelize in Samaria, when the Tetrarch’s lands were to the east.
And then there’s the Bartholemew problem. The lists of Apostles in the Gospels come in specific sets. The order is presumed to be that in which Jesus called them. In the Synoptics, Philip is always paired with Bartholemew[]. John does not provide lists of apostles, nor does he mention Bartholemew. Modern readers connect Bartholemew with Nathanael in John, since Philip calls him to become an apostle[] in that book.
If Nathanael is, in fact, the surname for our Bart, then those two facts together constitute the better part of what information we have about either. If one attempts to extract a Hebrew base from this Hellenized name, you get something that resembles bar Ptolemy, perhaps implying that Nathanael is a son of the Ptolemy family, and thus local royalty. Working from the premise that the Apostle Philip was also the Tetrarch, it makes a lot of sense that his buddy would be a prince. We know that Philip the Tetrarch was the son of a certain “Cleopatra of Jerusalem”, who may have a connection to the more famous Cleo in Egypt — the last of the Ptolemaic kings there! If so, there’s reason to anticipate that Nathanael was also a cousin.
The last references to Philip in the book of Acts have him meandering off to Caesarea[], and then having Paul and entourage arriving at his house there to find he had four virgin priestess daughters. Since we know the tetrarch died childless in his capitol, Caesarea Philippi, before Paul’s ministry began, we can safely rule out any identity relationship between the Tetrarch and the Evangelist.
Does it make sense that a Roman governor would be wandering around with some freak local cult? Actually, in that time and place, it made a lot of sense. Everybody was doing it, including government officialdom. Does it make sense that Philip the Tetrarch would fall in with Jesus? I guess that depends on whether he saw Jesus as the true descendant of the god he worshipped.
The final nudge of “evidence” is an observation I’ve made that really famous people need no introduction. The Bible goes into radical gyrations to describe who some people are, and for others, they simply drop the name and move on. It’s very likely that these names had certain cache from their local impact. If you’re referring to someone who’s not quite really famous, you include their home city, or what tribe they’re from. Case in point: “Cleopatra of Jerusalem”, Philip’s mum, is clearly distinguished from that more famous Cleopatra from the previous generation.
“Philip”, however, was a deadly common Greek name. So you can really go to Bethsaida and ask for “Philip” and everyone knows who you’re talking about? Oh, you mean the governor, Philip? And it’s not like this Philip hasn’t been mentioned in the earlier material, but again, it was common at the time.
What we do know about Philip the Tetrarch is that he lived in an area largely devoid of Jews. Instead, he lived in the land of the Bedouin. The one reference I have[] that even begins to describe his character[] suggests that he was a populist leader who traveled frequently around his domains. Someone such as this might have felt the weight of rulership very lightly, and may have had a great deal of time to expend on chasing Messiahs around.
From a more strictly minimalist perspective, we might postulate that Philip represented an older school, perhaps one derived directly from the Baptist, that the early church wished to co-opt. In Philip, along with Andrew and Simon Peter, it seems Christ (in the form of the Church) made a concerted effort to recruit away some of Bethsaida’s best and brightest from the school of John the Baptist.
Continuing, we could ease the need to directly connect Philip the Tetrarch with Jesus of Nazareth by saying that, for the stories, Philip represented the developing Christian communities in the Romanized areas northeast of the Sea of Galilee (that is, in Ituraea). One thing this could mean is that the early communities in Ituraea that did exist were tied in with groups similar to that of John the Baptist’s, or perhaps even to John the Baptist’s school.
What does it mean that the first apostles of Christ hail from Bethsaida[]? What claim to authenticity was being made here as regards the followers of John the Baptist[]? Did the John the Baptist community represent another set of Hebraic traditions, or were they a competing cult with a unique theology? What part does the Ituraean community play in its development? Alas, we may never know. But we can guess that the representatives from these communities had a hand in the establishment of the mythos of the Roman Catholic Church.
Tags: apostolic traditions·baptism·bible·early church·greeks·jesus traditions
