A Faith Finds Its Feet Ancient Christianities

THE ORIGINS of Christianity is the greatest story never told. Just under three centuries passed between Jesus' crucifixion and A.D.325, when Constantine the Great convened the Council of Nicaea.

- DOMINIC GREEN

After Constantine, Jesus worship, which began as one of many Judean cults opposed to the Roman empire, became Nicene Christianity, the state religion of a refounded Roman empire. Divine dispensation aside, it is not clear how this happened, especially in the early decades. The nativity and infancy of the world's biggest faith are a mystery.

Revealed faiths begin in a mystery of revelation: Moses sees the burning bush, Jesus hears the voice in the Judean desert, Muhammad meets the angel Gabriel in the Cave of Hira. The flash of inspiration leads to another mystery and a series of smaller revelations: history, as the Greeks called it. The prolonged, prosaic record of human actions records how religions are shaped by polemics and politics into institutions. The monument obscures its foundations and immures its founder.

The excavation of Christianity's foundations began with the Reformation search for accurate biblical understanding. In the 18th century, German Protestants developed this focus on texts and languages into "higher criticism," which applied the historical method to Jesus' era and the composition of the Gospels.

The torrent of popular biographies that began with Ernest Renan's "Life of Jesus" (1863) made the quest for the "historical Jesus" the 19th century's most high minded parlor game. Its conclusions remain the starting points of current research. Jesus lived and died as a Jew. His apocalyptic preaching was political, part of an antiRoman ferment that would erupt in the Judean revolt of A.D. 66. The Gospels were compiled after the Romans destroyed the temple at Jerusalem in 70 and should be interpreted in that fiery light.

The historical Jesus still fascinates, but sieving original quotations from the Gospels is chasing its own tale. Absent textual corroboration from non-Christian sources, Jesus remains a theological figure in a set of theological documents.