A Combustible Faith
How politics and religion forged Christian orthodoxy. A review of Philip Jenkins' latest book 'Jesus Wars.'
Roger E. Olson | posted 6/23/2010 08:40AM
Are you hungry for a rip-roaring tale of theological intrigue filled with conspiracies, Byzantine plots, murder, and mayhem? Or are you longing for a solid, informative, and accurate history of the development of Christian orthodoxy? If your answer is yes to both, Philip Jenkins's Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years (HarperOne) is your book. The church historian's latest is a page-turner for anyone even remotely interested in the history of Christianity and/or the Roman Empire.
Jesus Wars recounts in vivid detail the centuries-long struggle to define and enforce the orthodox doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ. The story begins in fourth-century Constantinople, where Roman emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the empire and called a council of all Christian bishops to settle once and for all the controversies about Jesus' humanity and divinity.
Far from settling the matter, however, Constantinople I (First Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381) engendered a dispute about Christ that eventually led to the fall of the Roman Empire and permanent divisions between Christians. Jenkins is well known as a scholar of Christianity's rise in the "Global South," a catchall for the non-Western world. In Jesus Wars, he explains the origins of some little-known (to Westerners) branches of Christianity, including the churches of Ethiopia, Egypt, Syria, Armenia, and Persia (roughly modern Iraq and Iran).
Virtually all Christians since Constantinople I have agreed that Jesus Christ was and is in some sense both human and divine. But the question of how that truth is to be expressed and defended led to the first killings of heretics by Christians. The great Christian cities of Antioch and Alexandria fell into political and religious rivalry over the fine points of Christology. Each city also wanted stronger influence in the new imperial capital, Constantinople, and so plotted to overthrow the city's patriarchs and replace them with their own favorite sons.
Jesus Wars recounts blow-by-blow how bishops, monks, emperors, wives and mothers of emperors (often as powerful as their husbands and sons), and laypeople tortured and killed each other in a long orgy of heresy-hunting that was inseparable from imperial politics. Like many other commentators on these events, Jenkins seems to view arch-heretic Nestorius, Antiochian patriarch of Constantinople in the early fifth century, as a relatively benign, misunderstood soul who was just trying to protect Jesus' full and true humanity. He was deposed and exiled, with many of his followers killed for their belief in the two natures of Jesus Christ. (Truth be told, Jenkins fails to do justice to the depth of the Nestorian heresy, which amounted to a denial of the Incarnation.)
Alexandrian patriarch Cyril, who almost single-handedly defeated Nestorianism in a controversy leading up to the third ecumenical council (Ephesus I in A.D. 431), comes across as only a little less diabolical than successor Dioscorus, who led a band of monks who killed the bishop of Constantinople at the so-called Gangster Synod at Ephesus in A.D. 449. In trying to be fair, Jenkins inadvertently reveals his sympathy for the Antiochians and his disdain for the Alexandrians.
June 2010, Vol. 54, No. 6
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