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Spring/Summer 1980

World Order

Keeping the Faith in Írán

Editorial

Christianity, A.D. 138

Nosratollah Rassekh

The Deification of Jesus

Jack McLean

Remembering the Master

Firuz Kazemzadeh

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 14, NUMBERS 3 & 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. Application to Mail at Second-class postage rates is pending at Wilmette, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $6.00; 2 years, $11.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $7.00; 2 years, $13.00; single copes $1.60.

Copyright © 1981, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Keeping the Faith in Írán

Editorial

4 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor

7 Christianity, A.D. 138

by Nosratollah Rassekh

21 The Indians

a poem by Len Roberts

23 The Deification of Jesus

by Jack McLean

46 Remembering the Master

a book review by Firuz Kazemzadeh

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Keeping the Faith in Írán

IN ÍRÁN the Bahá'ís are once more responding to the cruelest tests with increasing fervor and devotion. Economic pressures, burnings of shop, farm, and home, arrests, efforts to force recantation, even death and the threat of death to loved ones, have not dismayed these resurrected believers of the Heroic Age, who must indeed hear the voice of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as He says, this time for our generation to hear:

O ye loved ones of God! Be ye firm of foot, and fixed of heart, and through the power of the Blessed Beauty’s help, stand ye committed to your purpose. Serve ye the Cause of God. Face ye all the nations of the world with the constancy and the endurance of the people of Bahá, that all men may be astounded and ask how this could be, that your hearts are as well-springs of confidence and faith, and as mines so rich in the love of God. . . . And if all the believers be put to the sword, and only one be left, let that one cry out in the name of the Lord and tell the joyous tidings; let that one rise up and confront all the peoples of the earth.

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Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

THE PARALLELS between the history of the Bahá’í Faith in the midst of its second century and that of Christianity in its second century are impossible to resist. The Bahá’í Faith is fascinating to the historian of early Christianity in that it serves as a sort of contemporary laboratory in which events take place that help us to visualize what must have been happening in the early church, much as the study of Black English helps us to understand the processes by which Latin was transformed into the Romance languages of today. Similarly, for one interested in the Bahá’í Faith not only for its history but also for its future, the study of early Christianity may well offer some indications. But both kinds of extrapolation —from the Bahá’í Faith of today to the Christianity of the mid-second century, and from the subsequent history of Christianity to the future of the Baha’i Faith—are perilous. They may help us to understand, but they have no real “predictive power” because the conditions of nineteen hundred years ago are in many ways so different from the present that a host of dissimilarities must be taken into account—and the chances are that many of them would be missed (inaccessible to the historian and unrecognized by the inhabitants of the present). With these provisos we are proud to present two studies of early Christianity, one, a history of the early Christian community, by Nosratollah Rassekh, rather more social in its emphasis than the theological approach favored by Jack McLean in his article “The Deification of Jesus.” In fact, as striking as these parallels are, the differences between the early histories of these two faiths are perhaps even more instructive.

Speaking of early history, we offer you a book review of a delightful private journal, recently published, by Ramona Brown, who describes from her own experience the impact made in the San Francisco area by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá at the time of His visit there in 1912. Imagine the joy of historians nineteen hundred years hence on discovering this gem of reminiscence from our first century.

To the Editor

TO MOVE THE WORLD

I want to thank WORLD ORDER magazine for its publication of Gayle Morrison’s “To Move the World.” Ms. Morrison departs dramatically from the usual charming antiquarian approaches to biographies of American Bahá’ís. Not confining herself to reconstructing the past out of excerpts compiled from diaries, letters, journals, reminiscences, etc—she goes beyond these to place the life of Louis Gregory into a context of American life at the turn of the century.

By giving the reader a cutaway view of the [Page 5] two prevailing American cultures, white and black, separate and unequal, Ms. Morrison throws into dramatic relief the monumental task Louis Gregory set himself in striving for racial unity over the course of four decades.

Almost without precedent, Ms. Morrison reveals that racism also infected the early Bahá’í communities. This fidelity to the facts may be disquieting to some, but it is important to recognize and record the truth as it is. History is not well served by the judicious exclusion of unpleasant realities. “To Move the World” sets a high standard for scholarship and candor that other Bahá’í scholars might well emulate.

DUANE K. TROXEL

Mililani, Hawaii

DEATH OF A POET

You have lost a great poet, and whenever that happens the world seems full of lesser ones. And if there is a creature on the planet that causes more moral strain than a minor poet, it must surely be the lesser literary critic who craves to comment tirelessly on such distinctions.

I would not presume to write to you, since I am sure you have experienced your full share of both species and am reluctant to be categorized as either, were it not for my protective isolation from the growing centers of “Bahá’í culture.” Remoteness retains its ambiguous rewards, which at best may be detachment and at worst an eccentricity of perception that illumines the odd stone here and there as we stumble along His path. I do not know what is currently thought to be “good” poetry among Bahá’ís qualified to make such distinctions. And I am less familiar than dismayed by the tone of contemporary criticism in commenting upon the “bad.” But it had occurred to me that there may be clues, couched in the fine poetry of the Writings themselves, that could teach us the art of recognizing the sustained moment of illumination we identify as “good” in literature. And there are definite techniques, mirrored in the metaphors of these Writings, that teach us the manner most meet for making these distinctions in the language of literary criticism.

The loss of Robert Hayden in the literary world has coincided closely with the emergence of another poet whose tone and intention are entirely different and have a challenging impact on Bahá’í readers. I look forward very much to reading a review in your magazine of Roger White’s Another Song, Another Season. I also look forward to a detailed appreciation of Hayden’s complex work in the near future. But in order to appreciate fully the work of these two subtle and very different poets, I look forward eagerly to an article you might consider that would reflect the quality and temper of a “true” reader of poetry, an article that might suggest some of the principles we may be starting to identify, inspired by the Writings, along the path toward Bahá’í aesthetics.

Since we are at a crossroads with the death of one poet and the birth of a new, it may be timely to take stock of our standards of appreciation, reevaluate our critical tone, and refresh our perceptions of the poetry of a new dispensation in a language of literary criticism that best reflects it.

BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

Limassol, Cyprus

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Christianity, A.D. 138

The First of Three Studies on Religion and Society

BY NOSRATOLLAH RASSEKH

Already in the space of less than a century the operation of the mysterious processes generated by its creative spirit has provoked a tumult in human society such as no mind can fathom. Itself undergoing a period of incubation during its primitive age, it has, through the emergence of its slowly-crystallizing system, induced a fermentation in the general life of mankind designed to shake the very foundations of a disordered society, to purify its life-blood, to reorientate and reconstruct its institutions, and shape its final destiny.

—Shoghi Effendi

While that great body [the Roman Empire] was invaded by open violence, or undermined by slow decay, a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men, grew up in silence and obscurity, derived vigour from opposition, and finally erected the triumphant banner of the Cross on the ruins of the Capitol.

—Edward Gibbon

THE GOOD EMPEROR Hadrian died in A.D. 138. The Romans had good reason to grieve over the death of a ruler who for twenty-one years had given them peace, prosperity, and an efficient government. Less warlike than his predecessor, Trajan, Hadrian had, by returning Mesopotamia and Assyria to the Parthian king, helped to stabilize the boundaries of the Empire. In Germany he had erected protective walls against the barbarians. In Great Britain he had raised Hadrian’s wall, which ran across the narrow part of the island, from the Slway Firth to Wallsend on the Tyre, to mark the northern boundary of Roman Britain.

In avoiding foreign wars Hadrian had been free to concentrate on domestic affairs. He had raised the material splendor of the Empire through a magnificent building program. He had built for himself a sumptuous villa at Tivoli, with a fine view of nearby Rome, and a large tomb on the banks of the Tiber, an edifice that in the Middle Ages was to become the papal fortress of Castel Sant’ Angelo. Hadrian’s Pantheon, like so many other buildings of his time, represented Roman architecture at its best. Its domed roof of a single enormous concrete case, over 140 feet across, was indeed a magnificent engineering accomplishment.

The emperor had been an ardent traveler. Twelve out of the twenty-one years of his reign he had traveled all over the Empire, restoring old cities and establishing new cities in Egypt, Asia Major, and the Balkans. To correct the unequal distribution of governmental powers between Italy and the provinces, he appointed more provincials to high offices. Indeed, Hadrian himself and Trajan had come originally from Italica, a small town in Spain, the first real provincials to become emperors. During Hadrian’s reign almost half of the senators were of provincial origin.

Not only was life secure in A.D. 138, but it was pleasant. Throughout the Empire, from the ancient land of Egypt to the new province of Gaul and the newest province of Britain, country gentlemen lived in unparalleled luxury. Stories and sermons have created the impressions that the Romans spent half their [Page 8] time in dissipation and the other half in persecuting Christians. But no empire could have lasted for so many centuries on a diet of undiluted wickedness. No energy would have been left to create a culture!

The Roman appetite for pleasure was, indeed, colossal. Zest for the spectacular in entertainment was most luridly expressed in the “games.” Circus Maximus seated at least two hundred thousand spectators. Chariot racing and gladiatorial contests attracted enormous crowds. The proletariat formed the bulk of the audience, but boxes were reserved for senators, the Vestal Virgins, and the emperor. Various combinations of contestants provided entertainment. Gladiators were selected from among slaves, though the career was also open to freemen. A man in heavy armor with a short sword could be pitted against a lightly armed adversary who had a net for entangling the other. Groups of men fought each other. Men were matched against beasts and beasts against beasts. At the lunch break, for those who stayed, a minor attraction offered was the spectacle of condemned criminals with inadequate weapons combating hungry animals.

A more usual and more spectacular entertainment was, however, provided by the baths. Some were private, but the most famous were those public mammoth structures, covering the equivalent of a modern city block and accommodating fifteen hundred to three thousand bathers at one time. The old Pennsylvania Station in New York City was modeled on the Baths of Caracalla. There were warm, hot, and cold baths— and a prototype of saunas. The heating of the water was accomplished by an elaborate system of furnaces and piping; the Roman achievement in this area alone should be a source of great satisfaction for those modern critics who gauge the level of a culture by its plumbing.

Yet the Roman did not go to the baths just to get clean. There was space for athletic games and for moderate exercise. There were libraries and lecture and concert halls —testimonies to the Greek theory that a sound mind could exist only in a sound body.

The world of the Romans in the year 138 was not limited to spectacular sports and the inexhaustible search for physical pleasures. There was their own Empire to be explored. Many Romans became tourists and went to see the wonders of ancient Greece, the magnificent landscape of Syria, and the awesome sights of Egypt. Like all good tourists they left not only their money but their scribblings on the pyramids and the statues. Traveling on the Mediterranean Sea was safe and easy. A large and comfortable ship could take the traveler from the magnificent harbor built by Claudius at the mouth of the Tiber to Spain in seven days, to Alexandria in ten. Though there were no good hotels, letters of introduction to wealthy local citizens did guarantee comfortable quarters. A wealthy Roman could send his son to “college” in Athens, then send him a bank-draft, and in a week the young man would be spending the money.

Roads that radiated from the Golden Milepost in the Forum were to be the arteries of the thriving life of Roman civilization for ages to come as they had been for ages past. The speed of travel in 138 was as high as any in Europe or America before the age of the steam engine seventeen hundred years later. The roads were better than any in eighteenth-century Europe.

Postal services were instituted connecting the new provinces with the capital and were placed under the control of the state during Hadrian’s reign. Water was brought from distant lakes by aqueducts whose giant strides across the landscape symbolized the majesty and permanence of Rome. These structures are an awesome sight even today.

Incredible though it may seem, the same people who could indulge in orgies of cruelty produced great works of art, literature, and engineering. While the masses were amused by mimes who reveled in the buffoonery of low comedy, the educated Romans found pleasure in the social comedies of Menander [Page 9] as interpreted by his imitator Plautus.

The literature of the second century, written in both Greek and Latin, was rich and still excelled in purity of style. It had breadth and depth. Tacitus wrote his Annals and his Germania, providing not only information on facts, conditions, and characters of the past but also on thought and judgment about the affairs of man in general. Plutarch wrote his Lives with sharp character studies and, almost a generation later, Suetonius was to write his magnificent Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Among imaginative writers, Juvenal, Apuleius, and Lucian stood out for their satirical descriptions of contemporary society. Galen wrote medical treatises that would be basic texts for more than a thousand years and laid down principles of therapy. Ptolemy, a mathematician and astronomer, described the earth, drew a picture of Cosmos, and wrote essays dealing with cartography, harmony, and optics. In philosophy, the age of Cicero and Seneca had passed; but Epictetus (60-140) wrote on epicureanism; and the best known philosopher of the second century, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who composed his Meditations in Greek and eloquently prescribed the Stoic virtues, was yet to come.

The Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Tomb of Hadrian, all bear witness to the ability of the Romans to combine utility and daring engineering techniques, evidenced by the application of broad and high arches and mighty roof constructions.

Triumphal arches, victory columns, and baths erected during this period are among the outstanding monuments of ancient times. The relief sculptures adorning all these monuments represent the greatest of Roman art. Free standing statues, though mostly copies of Greek sculpture, were still among the finest of their kind.

In 138 Rome was a thriving Empire. The Pax Romana extended from Britain to the Caspian Sea, from the Rhine and the Danube to the Sahara. The Empire stretched more than 1,250,000 square miles and included more than 100 million people, representing many races, nationalities, and creeds. The signs of the Empire’s permanency seemed apparent everywhere. The Temple of Janus, built by Numa at the beginning of the Republic, still survived; and the new Pantheon, little more than a quarter-century old, gave every indication that it would remain unconquered by the passing centuries.

The emperorship of Trajan (98-117) had opened a series of successful reigns under the Flavian dynasty. This was the era of “Five Good Emperors.” For the next hundred years the new emperor was always a mature person with wide experience in public affairs, selected because of his ability and not because of family or place of birth.

Decade after decade of peace and good government had made their mark in a manner rarely equaled by any imperial power in history. The imperial administration, both central and provincial, had become the most extensive and detailed structure that the Mediterranean world had known. Its operations were governed by a professional code of efficiency, reasonable honesty, and support of Greco-Roman culture. The surviving letters between Trajan and Pliny the Younger, the governor of Bithynia (in Northwest Asia Minor) are testimonies to the sincere efforts of ruler and agent alike to secure the welfare of the governed.

All of civilization seemed embraced in one world, and no one of the generation of Hadrian could remember when it had not been thus. The Empire had created a concept of “civilization” that was an impressive phenomenon and perhaps the most enduring legacy of the peculiarly Roman genius. Benefiting from the many links, including common [Page 10] institutions, laws, customs, commerce without barriers, and cultural connections, the Hellenizing and Romanizing process was speeded up, and a feeling of unity unprecedented in history had developed. The long survival of the Empire owed more to this spiritual unification than to any other factor.

Hadrian had ruled an empire at its golden age, because it was also primarily an age of law. Legally far more gifted than the Greeks, the Romans were masters in fitting their statutes to circumstances of the moment, in adapting laws to the changing needs of new conditions; and, transcending their limited horizons in science, they could determine principles from any single instance.

For many centuries Roman law was a mixture of written statutes and unwritten customs. The Twelve Tables were written, as were many proceedings of the Senate and the Comitias and also the edicts and rescripts of emperors; but many customs in Rome had the force of law; and the international code, the jus gentium, was largely unwritten custom.

Under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian specially qualified jurists had collected and codified the existing body of judicial decisions and made important additions. An imperial court of appeal was created. Ideas of a supreme “unwritten” law applicable to all men (jus naturale) were becoming widely accepted.

For many generations the praetor’s edict had been one of the chief sources of law. This was a statement of the praetor (who had been the highest judge under the Republic) of the rules of law that would apply during his term of office. The edict had tended to become standardized over the years, but it was still neither wholly official nor completely set. Hadrian asked a leading Roman lawyer to consult past records and prepare a final and authoritative version of the praetor’s edict. The lawyer Salvius Julianus produced a version of the edict that became an enduring part of the law. This formulation of Roman law was one of the great achievements of western man. It was not perfect—no law is—but it was a great improvement over all earlier legal systems and has probably not been surpassed by any later ones. It was based on justice and equity—the Romans themselves described it as “the art of fairness and goodness,” or “a continuing desire to give every man his due.” It was comprehensive, flexible, and subtle; there were few situations that could not be brought under one of its rules. Though it did not eliminate class distinctions, it did admit that even the humblest man had some rights—for example those of slaves against their masters.

Justinian’s great compilation some four hundred years later was largely based on the work of the second-century jurists; through his code Roman law has, to the present time, affected the jurisprudence of almost every country in the world.

The death of Hadrian was not the end of an epoch. The three Antonine Emperors— Antoninus Pius (138-161), Marcus Aurelius (161-180), and Commodus (180-192) were to carry on the tradition of peace and prosperity for more than half a century. Gibbon believed that the years from 96 to 180 constituted the happiest period in the history of the human race. Today we can question his assumptions, but certainly the Roman Empire during this period did experience the most prosperous and least troubled time in its entire history. The impression is not mine only. Those who lived in the era believed it to be so. Pliny the Elder talked of the “immense majesty of the Roman peace,” and to a writer of the late second century it was: a world everyday better known, better cultivated, and more civilized than before. [Page 11] Everywhere roads are traced, every district is known, every country opened to commerce. Smiling fields have invaded the forests; flocks and herds have routed the wild beasts; the very sands are sown, the rocks are planted; the marshes drained. There are now as many cities as there were once solitary cottages. Reefs and shoals have lost their terrors. Wherever there is a trace of life there are houses and human habitations, well ordered governments and civilized life.

Writing during the rule of Augustus, Virgil had expressed the “mission” of the Empire: Others shall beat out the breathing bronze to softer lines . . . shall draw living lineaments from the marble; the cause shall be more eloquent on their lips; their pencils shall portray the pathways of heaven, and tell the stars in their arising: be thy charge, O Roman, to rule the nations in thine empire; this shall be thine art, to ordain the law of peace, to be merciful to the conquered and beat the haughty down.

Two centuries later the mission had been accomplished. Within the borders of an empire lived Greeks, Slavs, Jews, Phoenicians, Egyptians, North Africans, Iberians, Italians, Celts, Germans, and many others. The Romans had, out of these strands of many hues, woven a single fabric and created a civilization not of Rome but of the Roman world, a civilization that seemed destined to go on forever.

IN THE YEAR 138, then, what were the prospects for Christianity, still considered by the overwhelming majority of the Romans as the faith of obscure enthusiasts, originating from a despised Oriental people, to triumph over the acme of Greco-Roman civilization? Christianity was as yet still exclusively a faith and a movement, rather than a Church or an institution.

The birth of Christ and the Christian Faith had passed almost unnoticed by the people of the time. At His birth the Mediterranean peoples were celebrating an earthly redeemer —Augustus—who had changed chaos into order, to whom they yielded liberty but from whom they secured the blessings of peace and prosperity. The Roman world almost universally expressed gratitude for benefits received from the man who had been born “as a common piece of good luck for all mankind,” and who had “surpassed all past and future benefactors.”

While Christianity was inconspicuously attempting to survive, Augustus during his remarkable reign had made a spectacular attempt to stem the rising tide of moral change that had developed in the late Republic by enacting a comprehensive program of social, religious, and moral reforms. Adultery, previously widely condoned, had become a public crime with severe penalties. Childless couples were penalized. Special benefits were rendered to those with children. Horace was elegantly expounding in his Odes the virtues of the Romans of the Augustan Age: frugality, hardiness, and simplicity. Virgil painted the ideal figure: sober, tenacious, pious, and a slave to duty. Livy proudly traced the history of Rome from its humble beginnings to his own day, filling it with patriotic and moral examples.

The best preserved monument of the age, the Altar of Peace, is a simple structure surrounded by walls decorated with friezes whose serenity and order to this day convey a profound sense of the Augustan peace. No wonder that Mytilene declared that, “if anything more honorific than all these enactments is discovered in after times, the zeal and piety of our city will not be lacking in [Page 12] anything that can deify him even more.”

Against this background of the Augustan system, Christianity had crept, half hidden, along the foundations of society. It did not burst out in a flame of conquest as Islám would six centuries later. Its history was ignored by pagans and Christians alike. To the pagans its very obscurity left little to chronicle. If it had changed the lives of men and women, they were lives too insignificant to be noticed by history. Christianity had not won more than a disdainful paragraph—in Tacitus—at the hands of Roman historians.

Christians themselves saw little point in recording the history of their Faith when the second coming of the Messiah and the establishment of the heavenly kingdom was expected soon. Focusing on that kingdom, Christ’s followers minimized their care about this mortal and transient one. Their faith centered attention less on this world than on the world to come. Immortality for the individual was a doctrine shared by some other mystery religions of the pagan world; but only Christianity had developed—out of the apocalyptic literature of the Jews—the vaster dream of an imminent cataclysm in which the eternal kingdom would come for all at once.

Christ Himself had written nothing at all. The first Christians, expecting His immediate return, recorded nothing of their memories and impressions of Jesus until probably two decades after His crucifixion. Historians cannot determine what the Gospel really was in those few years of His ministry and soon after. For the historian to discuss in detail the life of Christ would be unsound since the source material is almost entirely in the Gospels, and those records of the work and the words of Jesus were not written down until the first flush of hope that He would soon return had passed away.

A century after the Crucifixion, Christianity was slowly developing a powerful literature of its own. However, while the scanty texts of the sayings and doings of its Founder were taking the shape in which we have them now, a Plutarch was writing biographies of the pagan heroes. No Christian Herodotus had appeared to gather its details, no Christian Polybius to weld it into the world’s history with scientific insight and critical acumen. No Christian Plutarch appeared for another three hundred years, and then all that the learned Jerome was able to present to us was a few paragraphs on the lives of the leading Apostles.

Not only are the events surrounding Christ’s life historically a blur, but so were at first the meaning of His mission and teachings. He had not erected a system of philosophy. He had issued a set of principles, each with great power in itself, but left as isolated pronouncements. Furthermore, they were expressed in parables that could be interpreted in different ways.

The crystallization of creed was affected by the conditions of the time. The crucifixion was, in the eyes of most observers, just another public execution. The question of the resurrection on the third day is no more amenable to historical judgment than are the miracles. But what does matter historically is that Christ’s followers did believe and that [Page 13] the small group about the disciples carried on the propagation of their Faith. Within twenty years after the Crucifixion there were strong Christian communities in Palestine and others throughout Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece. Most probably there were also Christians in Alexandria and a few other localities.

The early believers were loosely organized. James, the brother of Jesus, was recognized, in a sense, as the head of the movement. The original disciples constituted themselves as a kind of governing council or, at least, a court of appeal. But apart from propagating the Faith, the main activity of the Christian leaders during the second half of the first century was the definition of the basis for the Faith and the formulation of some of the primary theological inferences in documents such as the first three Gospels and the letters of Paul to his contemporaries.

In the year 138 the New Testament had not as yet been arranged and accepted as the fundamental literature of the new religion. The Gospel according to St. Mark was the oldest, written by a follower of St. Peter at Rome, probably around 60. It is not rigorously historical, but it was intended by its author to show that Christ’s passion was a proof that God had committed Himself to the flow of human life. The Gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke, both of which show traces that their authors knew and used Mark and other sources now lost, date from twenty to thirty years later. The Gospel according to St. John and the Book of Revelation date probably from the last decade of the first century.

Of the four Gospels, three were evidently written by Jews and the fourth (Luke) by a Greek-speaking physician.

But the oldest part of the New Testament is the Pauline Epistles. Yet Paul himself had never seen Christ. Paul had been a strict Pharisee, who at first considered Jesus and His followers as blasphemers against the Law and had taken part in the persecution of Christians. But sometime around 38, on the road to Damascus, according to his own testimony:

And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me.

And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

And I answered, Who art thou, Lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.

And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.

And I said, What shall I do, Lord? And the Lord said unto me, Arise, and go into Damascus; and there it shall be told thee of all things which are appointed for thee to do.

Paul turned from persecution to the greatest of Christian missionaries. Perceiving that the Faith could grow but very slowly in its own birthplace where the Jews were profoundly orthodox, he concentrated his missionary activities in the cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Being a Roman citizen protected by Roman law and thus free to travel, Paul preached the gospel, or “good news,” throughout the eastern part of the Empire; and he encouraged and inspired the small Christian communities by sending letters to the converts.

Before him the early Christians had formed only one of many sects within the larger body of Judaism. They seemed to have had no clear notion of the persons to whom Christ had directed His message. James, Jesus’ brother, who directed the central organization at Jerusalem was a conservative who believed that Jesus had come to fulfill Jewish prophecies. Peter, the chosen disciple, was bolder. He went on to preach the new Faith in Rome [Page 14] where he was crucified upside down in the Vatican Circus. The disciple Thomas went outside of the Empire to Parthia and was said to have reached India. Andrew preached to the Scythians. But Paul was the boldest. He firmly believed that Christian truth was not a matter of habit or reasoning but of transcending faith. His Epistle to the Romans is considered by many to be the first great work of Christian theology. He sent it probably from Corinth, sometime between 56 and 59, when he was contemplating carrying his mission to the West, even to Spain. For this, Rome was a natural base of operations, and before sailing for Rome he wished to gain the approval and support of its community of Christians. Thus he wrote his epistle to the Romans, defining the fundamental theology of Christianity as he saw it. He explained that Christ (from Christos, the Greek word for Messiah, “the anointed”) was the son of God and that He had died to atone for the sins of mankind. Man had inherited Adam’s original sin; he was inherently unrighteous— “There is none righteous, no, not one”—but there was a method whereby man could be justified—that is, “reckoned to be righteous” —even though the Law actually marks him as unrighteous. The method whereby God delivered man from sin was called grace, the gift of salvation bestowed by God regardless of man’s merit or desert. God made the life of Christ the symbol of deliverance through grace: Christ, though sinless Himself, was sent into the world as the bearer of all men’s sins; His sacrifice on the Cross came so “that the body of sin might be destroyed.” His salvation was signaled in His resurrection. Human salvation did not automatically result from the sacrificial death of Christ, but faith—complete trust in God’s grace as revealed in Christ—must be observed by man. If faith is genuine, the love that led to the sacrifice will be imitated, and man will have carried out the will of Christ and attained grace. The introduction of faith and love, unrecognized specifically by the Law, established a new relationship between man and God.

No follower of Christ was as responsible for shaping Christian doctrine as Paul, a thin man “little of stature, thin-haired upon the head, crooked in the legs, of good state of body, his eyebrows joining, and nose somewhat hooked, full of grace [who] sometimes . . . appeared like a man, and sometimes he had the face of an angel.” It was Paul, “the Apostle of the Gentiles,” who first appreciated the universality of the teachings of Jesus. “Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.” “For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.”

The small early Christian community had faced two great obstacles. First, Jewish Christianity was confined to the Jews and offered no message of salvation for the Greeks or other Gentiles. Second, early Christian Jews insisted that all believers in the new religion should follow the Law of the Old Testament to the letter. Thus, the only way to resolve the issue was to free the Christian belief from the strictness of Judaism, and it was Paul who found the way. He proclaimed that converts need not follow the detailed prescriptions of the Law. “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free.” “For the letter [of the Law] killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Paul carried the message of Christian universality to Syria, Cyprus, [Page 15] Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, and elsewhere, everywhere founding churches. Without Paul, early Christianity, some historians believe, could have remained another minor faith among the multitude of creeds and cults to be found throughout the Roman Empire.

The Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, describes the transformation of Christianity from the faith of a sect dominated by Jews and Jewish Law into a religion appealing principally to non-Jews.

Acts catapults the reader into the troubled world of first-century Palestine. Judaism under the pressures of foreign domination and successive waves of Greek and Roman cultural influences was a religion in crisis. Aristocratic Sadducees were a minority committed to a strict literal interpretation of the Biblical law and the support of Roman rule—and they controlled the Temple in Jerusalem. The Pharisees denounced the foreigners and urged the expansion and modification of Biblical law to meet new conditions. Some other smaller sects such as Essenes urged the possibility of immediate redemption through a new leader, a Messiah.

Acts describes the growth and change of Christians. While the authorship is not certain, most scholars believe that Luke compiled it, probably sometime after the collapse of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in 70. The council of the early Christian leaders in Jerusalem that occupied an important place in the narrative of Acts, took place in 49. Luke was not personally involved in the earlier events he describes. He relies on the memories of older Christians and a young Christian tradition handed down to the second and third generation of converts and on a few written accounts of the first years of the new religion which have since been lost.

The death of St. John around 100 brought to an end the Apostolic Age. The governing center since Jesus’ time had remained at Jerusalem, where under James a board of disciples and seven deacons had acted as administrative officials. But when James was martyred by the Jews before the Jewish revolt of 66-70, many Christians of Jerusalem were forced to flee the city for a time, and the Christian churches over the Empire were to become virtually independent. Even further, the central unity of the growing Christian communities was crippled when the Romans, after crushing the Jewish revolt, destroyed Jerusalem in 70. Now each church had to be governed by its own elders or presbyters and by 100 a leader, the bishop, was becoming dominant in each city.

In fact, the first 138 years of the Christian era were among the darkest in its entire history. In the course of reducing Christian principles to a logical system, differences of opinion were bound to spring up. Without a centralized authority or a canonic literature, unity or uniformity could not be expected. Though Christians still felt some sense of a common creed and unity against a hostile outside world, after the martyrdom of James, they were never able to turn toward the same focal point. The Churches were small and severely tested by doctrinal disagreements, and suffered from the dislike of pagans and Jews alike. In different provinces of the Empire there existed different systems of church government, and as an English Churchman has put it: “the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, and the Independent can each discover the prototype of the system to which he himself adheres.” The doctrine of Apostolic Succession—that is, the belief that the powers given to the disciples of Christ before His ascension, were handed down from bishop to bishop by the sacrament of ordination—was not universally accepted. Many were against [Page 16] a systematic order that tended to eliminate the mystical and the ecstatic. Then there were the followers of Marcion (who died around 160), who, carrying Paul’s doctrines to their extreme, denied any connection between Christ and the God of the Old Testament. They were spreading widely and forming an independent church. In Asia Minor, Montanists preached the imminent coming of the New Jerusalem and totally opposed Roman authority. Bishop Montanus believed that certain living believers were prophets who were continually receiving direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit. His followers instigated such orgies of prophecy that the orthodox church denied the need for new revelations and declared that all the truths needed for salvation had been completed upon the death of the evangelist St. John, the last inspired author.

Another major and long-lasting dispute was with the Gnostics, beginning even before the year 100. The Gnostics believed that the mastery of special knowledge (Greek: gnosis) assured salvation. They proceeded to elaborate complicated myths that constituted the gnosis needed for salvation. They attempted to incorporate the history of Jesus on earth into their mythological systems. To some Gnostics Jesus was the savior, but they denied His humanity as an affront to the pureness of divinity—nor would they accept His bodily resurrection. In 138 the leading Gnostics were Basilides and Valentinus. It was against them that the orthodox fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch would reaffirm the historical reality of Christ and His sacrifice as an act of history rather than an allegorical symbol. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, in his treatise “Against the Heresies” used the Scriptures to refute the gnostic separation of human and supernatural in Christ and lead the way for the first systematic exposition of orthodoxy of belief.

In Palestine the Jewish-Christian church at Jerusalem continued under a regular line of leaders after James until the great revolt of 132-35. But the imperial ban on Jewish inhabitation of the city, thereafter, helped to reduce the Christians of Palestine who fully accepted the Judaic Law to a minor sect called Ebionites.

It was not just the internal disputes that threatened the survival of Christianity. Externally, in the year 138 Christians were facing strong challenges from other religious movements and opposition from the imperial government. Like the Jews, Christians made no compromises with Roman authorities or paganism—either with pagan polytheism or pagan morality. Early Christians viewed themselves as the new Israel, members of a holy nation, a chosen people facing an unbelieving and threatening world. From the beginning until the reign of Constantine the Great some three hundred years later, Christian communities remained an illegal, sometimes persecuted sect within the Empire.

Romans looked suspiciously at people who were exclusive, claimed sole possession of the right paths of life, denied all gods, and had such an unusual scale of values. They were suspected of all sorts of horrid crimes such as incest, infanticide, and ritual murder. There was a wide gulf between the basic principles of Christianity and those of classical civilization. Humility, charity, forgiveness, loving one’s neighbor as one’s self— these were not the accepted moral standard of the Greco-Roman world.

ROMANS were a tolerant people. But there was a practical limit to their religious freedom, which after all was based on no ideal of religious liberty, and certainly not on any [Page 17] concept of separation of church and state. Rome deified the emperor to give its motley collection of peoples a common allegiance —something like a national flag as a symbol of unity. Augustus had taken the step toward associating an element of divinity with his position—a public worship of two divinities (Rome and emperor). Thereafter, officially each emperor was designated as divus after his death—deified by an act of the Senate. It was an attempt to make the emperor a transcendent being and to provide a metaphysical basis for legitimacy and power.

But like the Jews who had refused to sacrifice to Baal, the Christians refused to adore the emperors. They even went beyond that. Inasmuch as the emperor pretended to be a god, he was, they said, in fact a devil.

Thus Rome considered Christians unpatriotic and subversive. Persecution of Christians was often in the form of social and economic ostracism. Contrary to the popular concept, violent physical persecutions were sporadic and came in some half dozen major waves over three hundred years—and were subject to great local variation.

The best known came very early in the year 64 and was described by Tacitus as a deliberate attempt of Nero to find a scapegoat for the disastrous fire in Rome. Tacitus’ narrative also indicates how most cultivated pagans regarded the new sect. Christians were considered an unpopular social group rather than a religious minority:

Therefore to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, . . . and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not only in Judaea, the home of the disgrace, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. First, then, the confessed members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race. And derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed, were burned to serve as lamps by night.

To Tacitus Christians were criminals, but in another generation an able and conscientious member of the Roman ruling class had some doubts. Pliny the Younger wrote his emperor, Trajan (98-117), from Bithyria in Asia Minor where he had gone as governor, that he was puzzled about Christians. He had not found any evil among the Christians accused before him of various wrong doings, except their refusal to worship the emperor or other gods. Should he punish them, he asked the emperor, just because they admit to being Christians, or must he have evidence of the horrid crimes that they were alleged to have committed. Many, he wrote the emperor, recanted and worshiped Trajan’s image, but he went on:

They affirmed, however, the whole of their guilt or their error, was, that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food—but food of an ordinary and innocent kind. . . . I judged it so much the more necessary to extract the real truth with the assistance of torture, from the female slaves, who were styled deaconesses; but I could discover nothing more than depraved and [Page 18] excessive superstition.

Emperor Trajan’s reply directed the governor not to search out Christians but to punish any who had been properly indicted:

No search shall be made for these people; when they are denounced and found guilty, they must be punished; with the restriction, however, that when the party denies himself to be a Christian, and shall give proof that he is not (that is, by adoring our gods) he shall be pardoned on the ground of repentance even though he may have formerly incurred suspicions. Information without the accuser’s name subscribed must not be admitted in evidence against anyone, as it is introducing a very dangerous precedent, and by no means agreeable to the spirit of the age.

The next systematic persecution of Christians, which lasted for three years, was not to take place until 235 when Maximinus was the emperor. But that period of persecution was confined to Palestine and the city of Rome. Emperor Decius instigated a general persecution in 250, and the last and greatest was to take place under Diocletian in the year 303.

However, the Roman Empire, though unaware, was helping rather than hindering the movement by providing security and order. Roman peace facilitated communication. From its very beginning Christianity had been a missionary faith, as the Acts of the Apostles make clear; and for the missionaries facilities for moving about by land and sea were better than they had ever been and better than they would be again for many centuries. Those Christians who scorned arms were protected by the might of the Roman legionaries in their pioneering efforts to convert others.

Thus, though despised and suspected, Christians still succeeded in increasing their numbers. The movement had been well implanted in the cities and at places even in the more conservative countryside, though it had made few converts among the ruling or even the wealthy class. Few intellectuals had embraced the Faith. In 138 the imperial cult still remained a powerful focus for political and economic loyalty. Yet as men were turning more and more into political ciphers, their attachment to the state of religion was weakening. Many thinkers and artists of the Empire reflected the contemporary spiritual uneasiness and void and searched for meaning in a vast, materialistic world. Some turned to skepticism. Sextus Empiricus in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism set down a rounded system of skepticism; it was considered a comfort to men to point out that “nature’s chief blessing, death” ended their existence. Others accepted predestined Fate by their belief in astrology, or sought to blandish its forces by magic. Among the upper classes philosophy was used to provide a guideline for moral behavior, and the Stoics in particular tried the thoughtful life of self-scrutiny. But philosophers could offer little beyond negative, rationalistic, pessimistic preachings; and philosophy seldom filled the spiritual void in the heart of man. The most direct expression of man’s continuing search for meaning has always been in the field of religion.

In 138 the Roman world had, indeed, its share of mystic religions. The search for meaning was reflected in the popularity of oracles and miracle workers and the rise of [Page 19] a host of emotional, personal faiths. To some, Babylonian astrology seemed an answer. Even Ptolemy wrote a book about it, the Tetrabiblos. To others more personal faiths were the answer. From Egypt had come the Hellenized cult of Isis, a cult that provided the consolation of a future life, a consoling mother-figure in Isis herself, a mystic link with the great Egyptian past, and abundant miracles. Membership was symbolized by baptism that removed the initiate’s sins. Sarapis, Isis’ consort, judged the true believer upon his death and gave him everlasting life. Isis, Sarapis, and their child Harpocrates formed a sacred trinity. Each fall Sarapis was ritualistically killed and resumed life on the third day. The cult of Isis was popular everywhere. Next to Hadrian’s magnificent villa was an Egyptian garden dedicated to Isis and Osiris and filled with their monuments. Symbols of the Egyptian goddess have been found on the banks of the Seine, the Rhine, and the Danube.

From Írán came Mithraism with its characteristic Persian dualism and the eternal tension between the forces of light and darkness, Mazda and Ahriman. It promised rewards and punishments in future life, and Mithra himself was regarded as the intermediary between God and man. Its major ritual act involved the sacrifice of a bull, and the believers were baptized in the bull’s blood. The regular services of priests included a consecrated bread and drink. In the frontiers, Mithraism was the favorite religion of the legionnaires, and many legions had their underground chapel where Mithra’s triumph was celebrated. A third cult, that of Cybele or the Great Mother, was brought to Rome officially in 204 B.C. Each spring, on 25 March, the coming of the season was celebrated as the resurrection of her consort Attis.

In 138 Christianity to many Romans seemed but one of the mystery sects, and a Christian, viewing the world around, could well have been overwhelmed by the obstacles that everywhere prevented the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. He was a member of a minority sect, suspected by the government, despised by its citizens, and challenged by other cults.

By the end of the second century the church writer Tertullian (c.160-c.230) was to tell the pagans: “We have filled your whole world, cities, islands, country towns, even the camps, the tribes, the boards of judges, the palace, the Senate, the bar. We have left you only your temples.” But this was more a statement of hope than an expression of reality. One hundred years after Tertullian’s boast, Christians constituted no more than 10 percent of the population of the Empire, and 165 years after the death of Hadrian, Diocletian was to launch the harshest persecution of Christians yet. He ordered all Scriptures to be surrendered so that they could be burned. Churches were destroyed, and all Christian worship was suspended. Christians were stripped of civil rights and political privileges and were under constant threat of torture and death.

While this was happening to Christians in 303, who could have foreseen that within only nine years Emperor Constantine would grant freedom of worship to all Christians and would recognize the Church as the legal body before the law, a fact that meant the Church could not only hold property but accept bequests and have its own ecclesiastical courts? Who could have foreseen that the Emperor himself would triumph in a battle under the Christian emblem and would be baptized a Christian, and that at Nicaea, in the year 325, he would preside over the first ecumenical conference of Christ’s Church and sign the Nicene Creed as the basic document of Christian belief? Who could have predicted [Page 20] that before the century was over Theodosius the Great (379-95) would make Christianity the state religion of the Empire?

THE TRIUMPH of a once obscure, despised sect of “simple religious enthusiasts” in a mature, well-organized, rich, and intellectually sophisticated society is one of the most dramatic facts of history, subject to many different interpretations and impossible fully to explain.

Theology insofar as it concerns itself with historical events, transfers history from the realm of human action to that of divine grace and thus interprets the phenomena of time and change in terms of timeless and unchanging Deity. Human effort falls, in reality, outside of the range of humanity and is not significant in the unfolding of God’s will. Man thus becomes a spiritual robot, moving about as programmed by his Creator and is not accountable for the direction of his movement or the consequences of his action.

On the contrary, a revealed religion cannot be studied strictly by naturalistic-historical methods. Historical explanations can be given, and great generalizations are, indeed, tempting to the historians, but they cannot be proved. History can never explain all the conditions under which a revealed religion is likely to emerge.

Historians have provided us with some very reasonable explanations for the final triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire. They have pointed out that in the century between the death of Marcus Aurelius (180) and the accession of Diocletian (284) the Empire was beset by the collapse of constitutional government; that the turbulence on the Persian and German frontiers caused the militarization of the imperial administration; that increased taxes, inflationary policies, and the enforced recruiting necessary to support the army and the bureaucracy shattered economic prosperity; that Roman citizenship, as it became more and more common, was no longer the cause of privilege and pride but of financial and military burdens that most Romans wanted to avoid and many abhorred; that the Roman army acted no longer as the guarantor of the Pax Romana but became involved in the political game of emperor-making; and that while the Empire floundered in anarchy Christianity made a sustained effort to win converts, build an organization to keep scattered groups in touch with each other, provide some uniformity of faith and morals, and imposed a new standard of virtue that furnished a corrective to the lurid imperial sins. Historians further inform us that, as the social structure of the Empire weakened, individual Christian churches furnished their members and converts a strong social and psychological unity and that Christ’s message of personal immortality, the rewards of heaven, a lofty moral code, and sharing in lovingkindness with one’s fellows on the earth, provided for His followers that feeling psychologists today rather bleakly call “personal identification.”

Historians have explained that the rise of Rome as the major Christian center in the West coincided with the progressive erosion of its secular power, that as the Rome of the Caesars fell, the Rome of the Papacy remained, that the City of God was erected over the ruins of the City of Man. The Pax Romana disappeared in the West, but a new international order had already emerged that progressively filled the power vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman state. The Church, having dealt for centuries with persecution, internal division, and external challenges, had acquired the spiritual resiliency and the store of political skill with which it was able to organize Europe after the barbarian invasions, to salvage much of the culture of the Greco-Roman world, and ultimately to create a whole new civilization of its own.

But all these historical explanations are pale abstractions before the fact that Christ’s message prevailed because it won its way into the hearts of living men and women. Its appeal was not a “rational” but a “spiritual” one. It triumphed because the power of its spiritual force could no longer be denied.

In the year 138 a Christian could well have become overwhelmed by all the obstacles [Page 21] around him. But he knew that Christ would return. Had He not told His followers: “There be some standing here, which shall not taste death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom”? To him “heaven” was no mere hope; “hell,” no mere threat. They were, like the Second Coming, certainties. He acted upon his faith and did not react to the outside forces. Acting upon his faith, he went about, quietly and obscurely, to do his share to bring about the promised day. Persecution and threat of persecution kept the unbelievers out. Conscious of the reality and immediacy of the emotional tie that Christianity forged between him and Christ, and among all those in the Christian brotherhood, the follower of Christ became the “Evangel” who longed to share his “good news” with Jews, Greeks, Romans, and all the varied folk of the Empire who were willing to listen—how could any historian put all of this in the cold words of history books?

Christ had brought the Spirit and the guidelines; and fortified and guided by that Spirit, humble men, unnoticed by history—Peter, James, Paul, Luke, Matthew, and John—became the architects and the builders of a whole new civilization that was to be the foundation of Western society for the next two thousand years.

In those dark and seemingly hopeless early centuries this “multitude of obscure enthusiasts” did far more to change the course of history and profoundly affect the life of Western man than the combined efforts of all of Plutarch’s heroes, all of the Roman emperors —the “Five Good” ones and all the bad ones —and all of the classical philosophers and intellectuals combined. How can a historian explain “the operation of the mysterious processes” generated by Christ’s creative spirit that brought about such a transformation? All that he can write is that it happened.

The Indians

I hear their steps at night

the Indians are walking my woods again

they carry spears with tips of light

I hear their lips muttering

a familiar color rises

in the dark trees

I climb it to wake

someone is calling me

—Len Roberts

[Page 22]

[Page 23]

The Deification of Jesus

BY JACK MCLEAN

Despite the growing numbers of encounters in recent years of the world religions in forums of exchange Christianity continues to set itself apart through a firm belief in the uniqueness of its founder, Jesus Christ. While individual Christians may acknowledge the inspirational nature of the non-Christian founders of religions, adherents of the major branches of Christianity are united in the belief that Christ has no equal. This conviction in the uniqueness of Jesus has become the unassailable fortress of Christian belief.

Such a belief is the product of historical and theological developments in the early church. Through a series of creeds based on theological speculation Jesus the Son was declared to be the very essence of Divinity walking upon the earth, the Godhead Itself united with a deified Holy Spirit in a trinitarian theology. These creeds, far from descending upon the church fathers as divine revelation, underwent a long historical development that was not uncontested. They were finally elaborated in their present form after four centuries of acrimonious theological quarreling that necessitated four world councils of the church—those of Nicaea, Ephesus, Constantinople, and Chalcedon—that brought in their wake bloody warfare among Christian factions. These christological controversies resulted in the fragmentation of the churches of Asia Minor from those of Greek Orthodox Constantinople, a fragmentation that has continued to this day.

The writings of the Apostle Paul were a great factor in this deification of Jesus. Paul’s interpretation of the Christ figure bears the unmistakable stamp of a savior figure of the Greek mystery religions into whose form Jesus was cast. The statements of Jesus Himself, however, do not support His exaltation to the Godhead. As the Son, Christ clearly saw Himself in a role subordinate to that of the Father.

In this paper I offer a three-dimensional study of the historical, doctrinal, and comparative aspects of the deification of Jesus. I will first examine Paul’s interpretation of Jesus to Gentile Christians together with a contrasting interpretation set forth by Christ Himself. I will also include the Gnostic Jesus, which touches indirectly on the christological question. Third, I will review two major christological controversies: (1) the schism of Arius and the development of the notion of trinity; and (2) the God-man debate at Cyril and Nestorius. These movements spanned a four-hundred year period. In my comparative study I will present a Bahá’í perspective on the deification of Jesus and, where possible, make comparisons with the Bahá’í Faith on relevant issues.

Bahá’í-Christian studies are by no means new in the literature of the Bahá’í Faith. They promise, however, to be of continuing interest as the Christian world comes to grips with the serious claims made by Bahá’u’lláh to the followers of the Gospel.

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St. Paul and the Deification of Jesus

IN CHRISTIANITY the writings of Paul have had a determining role in transmitting a characteristic understanding of Christ. With the gradual demise of the Jewish wing of Christianity Paul’s Christology came to the forefront in the Christian understanding of Jesus. His glorification of Christ’s divinity has played a major role in the deification of Jesus. If Christ taught the kingdom, it is true to say Paul taught Christ.

While generally enjoying widespread acclaim among Christians, Paul has not escaped being a subject of great controversy, both for his contemporaries and ours. His missionary journeys to Greece and Asia Minor, coupled with a sizeable corpus of theological writings, have earned him the adulations of some Christians as “the second founder of Christianity.” Other more critical theologians have been less enthusiastic in their acclamation of Paul. Basing his view on a study of Paul’s epistles, one comparative religionist has referred to him as “The problem figure of primitive Christianity” who became embroiled with the pillars of the mother church at Jerusalem—Peter, James the Lord’s brother, and John—over the teaching and admission of the Gentile Christians into the new faith. The first council of the primitive church, the [Page 25] Jerusalem Council, was convened in the holy city (A.D. 49) to resolve the controversy.

The writings of the Apostle Paul effected a great transformation of Jesus from the Jesus of the synoptic gospels and of non-Pauline epistles in the New Testament. Paul recast Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish Messiah of Israel, into a deified Lord bearing all the traces of a savior-god of a Greek mystery cult. Styling himself Apostle “among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:16; Acts 9:15), Paul determined to adapt his presentation of Jesus to the Greek Gentile world in which he lived, a radically different religious milieu from the Jewish one. What is often overlooked, however, in Paul’s claim to mission to the Gentiles is that Peter claimed precisely this mission for himself at the Jerusalem Council, a mission he states he had “in the early days.”

For Paul to have preached Christ as the Jewish Messiah to the Greek-speaking Gentiles would have been futile. The messiahship was a virtually meaningless concept to the Gentile world that Paul determined to evangelize. To them there was no long-standing tradition of a davidic kingship that promised an anointed of God who would rise up and vindicate Israel. Furthermore, certain of the Ebionite Christians, who were dominant in the apostolic church until Romano-Pauline Christianity emerged, reconciled their faith in Christ with temple worship as well as with circumcision and dietary and purification laws. Accordingly, he preached “another Jesus,” one whom those living in the Greek-Gentile world could understand and to whom they could relate.

The Jesus that Paul preached was a deified savior, One Who could rescue a hapless humanity from the power of sin. It was precisely this presentation of Jesus as redeemer of men’s sins and purveyor of immortality to those who [Page 26] accepted Him in a personalized faith that has prevailed in western Christendom ever since.

The religious background of the Gentiles explains why Paul’s approach was so successful. The Greek-speaking Gentiles whom Paul addressed held that the flesh was a degraded form of spirit, a “tomb” as Plato had taught, from which the spirit longed to escape. Its liberation was only final and complete with death, and there the prospects of Hades were dark and terrifying. The Gentiles, then, had bleak prospects for the future life and longed for deliverance from sinful corporeal existence. In search of solace they had turned to the Greek mystery cults that promised them a means of escape. The mystery religions held that by choosing and worshiping a personalized deity, a savior, a man could escape death and win eternal life. The personalized worship of a savior was accompanied by sacramental rituals that bear striking resemblances to Christian sacraments. Through such savior worship and sacramental observances the devotee could be Lat. renatus ‘born again’ into a new spiritual existence. Thus, like the mystery religions, Pauline Christianity offered itself as a religion of bondage and liberation, through a deified savior. As such it thoroughly satisfied the Gentile penchant for personal religion.

The presentation of Christ to the Gentiles as the redeemer of their sins and purveyor of immortality was one of Paul’s central themes, a theme known otherwise as “vicarious atonement” (at-one-ment), man’s reconciliation with God through the sacrificial death of Jesus: “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:23-25). Paul’s writings are thoroughly imbued with the consciousness of men’s sins, a concern that occupies the opening chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. Although St. Augustine fully elaborated the doctrine, Paul’s understanding of the Genesis account of the fall of Adam (Gen. 3) qualifies him as the originator of the doctrine of original sin (Rom. 5:12-21). Whatever one may think of Paul’s other doctrines, his preoccupation with sin has, in my view, stamped Christianity with much of the morbidity that is sometimes found in it.

[Page 27] In a bold departure from Judaism Paul taught that faith in Christ’s sacrificial death freed the believer from the constraints of Jewish law (Rom. 7:6). Paul, however, was inconsistent in his stand on the law. At the request of James he observed the rites of purification in the temple as a proof of his Jewish orthodoxy to the Jewish-Christians of Jerusalem (Acts 21:21-26). The Acts version of the Jerusalem Council also states that Paul agreed to Jewish dietary laws. However, in a differing account Paul states that he reached a compromise with the Jerusalem elders only on the point of maintaining contributions to the mother church in Jerusalem. To a more orthodox group at Jerusalem, probably the Judaizers, Paul levels the charge of “false brethren” and states that “to them we did not yield submission even for a moment” (Gal. 2:5).

Paul’s teaching of the bodily resurrection of Jesus also paralleled the mystery cults. Like the resurrected saviors, Isis, Attis, or Mithra, Paul taught Christ’s bodily resurrection mystery as a proof of His deity. Mystical union with Jesus was offered to the believer through the ritual of immersion baptism, from which the neophyte Christian emerged a new spiritual being, as Christ had emerged immortal from the grave (Rom. 6:1-11).

Paul’s interpretation of Christ to the Gentiles contained another radical departure from Israelite religion. This was his presentation of Christ as God. Paul presents Christ as God through two main modes: by blurring the distinction between Christ and God, and by conferring upon Jesus attributes normally reserved for God alone.

In the Greek version of the Torah, the Septuagint, the most common name for God was kyrios ‘Lord’. The mystery cults also called their saviors “Lord.” Paul, in his epistles, freely applies the term to Jesus. For example, the promise of the Jewish prophet Joel that “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (2:32) Paul transposes and applies to Jesus (Rom. 10:9). For Paul Christ’s prophetic station not only eclipsed that of Moses, “Jesus has been counted worthy of as much more glory than Moses" (Heb. 3:3), but it took on a cosmological function reserved for God alone, that of creation itself. Christ was the one in whom “all things were created, in heaven and in earth . . . all things were created through and for him” (Col. 1:16).

Paul more clearly identified Christ with God through his teaching of the incarnate sonship, the belief that God the Father became incarnate in Christ the Son: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9, cf. 2 Cor. 5:19 and Col. 1:15). The term “Son of God” was not new to the Jews. The term had an ancient usage that was applied to Israel’s sacral king, the Messiah (Ps. 2:7). In applying it to Christ Paul did not use the term primarily in its Judaic sense but rather in its mythological hellenistic sense of the Son of God as an incarnation of the Deity.

In spite of Paul’s preferred usage of the term “Son of God” this was not the term with which Christ primarily designated Himself. Christ most often [Page 28] refers to Himself as Heb. bar nasha ‘Son of Man’, a title that not only designates Christ’s perfect humanity, a standard interpretation, but primarily the Heavenly Man, a divine adamic prototype, created at the beginning of time, who would usher in a spiritual rather than a political kingdom. Such a description fits Jesus. Christ rarely refers to Himself as “Son of God,” in all probability because His Jewish opponents interpreted this designation in the mythological sense that Yahweh had generated offspring. In any case, to them it signified a blasphemous identification with God worthy of His condemnation and death (John 5:18). But of the two terms, “Son of Man” is charged more fully with potency and significance.

What is so extraordinary about the affirmations of Christ’s deity made in the writings of Paul and the creeds is how little account such declarations take of the pronouncements of Jesus about Himself. A careful examination of certain passages impels us to make a serious reevaluation of what is stated in the trinitarian theology of the creeds and the writings of Paul. While certain statements of Jesus clearly indicate that their author regarded Himself as a Divine Manifestation revealing the will of the Father (John 10:30; cf. John 8:19, 14:7), taken as a whole, they reveal that Christ clearly subordinated Himself to the essence of Divinity.

Paul’s assertion that “Jesus has been counted worthy of as much more glory than Moses” (Heb. 3:3) has led Christians to uphold a radical discontinuity between Christ and the Prophets of Israel and Judah. Though Christians assent to Christ’s own declaration that He fulfilled the Jewish law (Matt. 5:17), they insist that, on the basis of Christ’s divinity, He is disqualified even to assume the title of prophet.

Not only did Christ refer to Himself as a “prophet” on occasion, but He did so in the context of linking His own suffering and rejection with that of the prophetic figures of Israel and Judah. After His rejection by fellow Galileans at Nazareth, He remarked that “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (Mark 6:4). Christ further established His prophetic function by linking His own coming to the prophecy of Moses, the greatest of His Hebrew predecessors, that “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you” (Deut. 18:15). Christ indicated that He was the prophet promised by Moses (John 5:45-47).

Christ’s identification of Himself as the “Prophet” promised by Moses was precisely the christological understanding held by the earliest group of Jewish Christians, the Ebionites. The Ebionite understanding of Jesus as the “Prophet” or the “True Prophet” is contained in “The Preaching of Peter” (Kerygmata Petrov), which forms a part of the uncanonical “Pseudo-Clementine Novel.” True-prophet Christology is also found in the apocryphal “Gospel of the Hebrews,” which was used by the Nazarene Christians. St. Jerome wrote that they regarded it as the original Aramaic Matthew. The parallels between the Jewish-Christian belief in Christ as the “True Prophet” Who appeared at the end of an Adamic cycle of prophetic figures and the Bahá’í concept of progressive revelation show basic similarities. The Jews who awaited the “True [Page 29] Prophet” believed in a cycle of prophetic figures beginning with Adam Who would appear until a period of great decay had set in. At that time the “True Prophet,” the great Teacher culminating the cycle would appear and inaugurate a spiritual kingdom.

At the first and second ecumenical councils of the church at Nicaea and Constantinople, it had been laid down that Christ was of the same essence with the Father and that the Godhead consisted of three divine persons. St Paul, with his doctrine of incarnate sonship, also put forth the notion of the coequality of Christ with the Father. As to the Nicene affirmation of His being of one essence with the Father, Christ was silent on that particular issue. The terms “essence” and “substance” were concepts borrowed from Greek philosophy and not biblical. Eusebius of Caesarea and other conservatives had opposed the Nicene creed on that account. As far as trinitarian theology is concerned, Christ declared to a scribe who had come to question Him that the belief in the divine unity was the greatest of the commandments: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one’” (Mark 12:29). By His affirmation that there was only one Lord—that is, God—Christ was lending His approval to the Jewish declaration of faith, the Shema, the belief that God is one. Jesus also referred to His Father as “the only true God” (John 17:3). Jesus indirectly repudiated the incarnation theology that God could take human form by declaring that “God is spirit” (John 4:24) and that “His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen” (John 5:37). Furthermore, Christ’s coequality with God, which was also affirmed at Constantinople, was something that he had emphatically denied on several occasions in His encounters with the Jews.

In an exchange with the Pharisees in which He established His station of Sonship Christ declared that both His mission and genesis were the Father’s doing, not His, thereby clearly dispelling any notion that He was equal in power with the Father: “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I proceeded and came forth from God; I came not of my own accord but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say?” (John 8:42-43). He revealed His dependence on the Father in another context. This occurred at a time when Christ’s fame as a healer had spread throughout Palestine. Since He had healed on the Sabbath, the Pharisees had accused Him of breaking Mosaic law. The Jews understood Christ’s reference to God as His Father in a mythological sense that implied identification with The Godhead. Such an identification caused the monotheistic Jews to level the charge of blasphemy against Christ. His response was: “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). Christ clarified His dependency on Divine Omnipotence in other passages: “I can do nothing on my own authority; as I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30). Shortly before His arrest, Jesus spoke these words to Judas, the brother of James (not Iscariot), in reference to His return: “You hear me say to you, ‘I go away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I go to the Father; for the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).

[Page 30] By His own admission, Christ established His relationship to the Father as that of Servant, a qualification that Bahá’u’lláh also applied on occasion to His own Station: “Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him” (John 13:16). Christ even went so far as to eschew Himself as a model of moral perfection in order to illustrate the sanctified nature of the Divinity: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18). Not only did Christ indicate that the Father was more perfect and more powerful than He but that the Divinity possessed a knowledge He did not fully share. This is reflected in one of Christ’s statements on the second coming: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matt. 24:36).

The Gnostic Jesus

AT THE SAME TIME that St. Paul was elaborating his exalted and mystical notions of Jesus, there were other Christians who held obscure beliefs of Christ and who were finally pronounced unorthodox by the Fathers of the Church. These were the Gnostics. Gnosticism was one of those “popular cults” and “fashionable and evasive philosophies” mentioned by Shoghi Effendi as one of a group of hybrid religions and philosophies in the Roman Empire that threatened to engulf infant Christianity. Entire Christian communities on occasion adopted Gnosticism as their creed. The Church Fathers, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and especially Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, arose to combat it fiercely in their writings.

Gnostic Christians compromised the unique soteriological role of Jesus with their indiscriminate belief in a host of savior figures (Gk. Soter ‘savior’). Christ was in fact often placed below other saviors and lesser divinities (Gk. aeons). This was the case for the Gnostic churches of Tarsus, Paul’s native city, which worshiped the supernatural powers of the Greek hero Heracles in an annual ceremony celebrating his death and resurrection. Gnostic Christians [Page 31] also compromised Christ’s soteriology in another way. For those Christians who accepted Christ alone as Lord, salvation was a matter of faith in Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Gnostics held that salvation was won through gnosis (Gk. ‘knowledge, insight’), which was viewed to be a higher state than faith. Their own form of gnosis was esoteric enough, sometimes held to be a secret knowledge transmitted by Christ to the Apostles and in turn to the leaders of Gnostic cults. Shoghi Effendi’s description of Gnosticism as “evasive” indicates that the Gnostic community never held to fixed tenets of belief.

Lacking a widely circulated scripture, the church at Rome formulated the first of the creeds, an orthodox doctrinal statement, to combat the Gnostic heresy (Gk. hairesis ‘party, school’). The Apostles’ Creed, composed between A.D. 150-75, alluded to the uniqueness of Jesus as the “only Son, our Lord,” to counteract Gnosticism’s submerging of Jesus in a host of other deities. To combat further the evasive teaching of esoteric Gnostic leaders, the Church Fathers recognized as authoritative teaching only the New Testament, which had derived directly from apostolic teaching.

The Christological Controversies

The Schism of Arius and the Development of the Trinity. By the end of the second century the force of the Gnostic movement with its competing savior figures was well-nigh spent. In the second, third, and fourth centuries Christology continued to occupy the central place in the writings of the Fathers. But christological writing at this stage was characterized by greater controversy than in earlier generations, controversy that finally escalated into open warfare between sectarians.

In the second and third centuries the church experienced dissension over the Monarchian controversy. Although this christological controversy provoked great debate, it did not seriously disturb Christian unity and died quietly toward the end of the third century.

[Page 32] The fourth century, however, witnessed a shock wave of major proportions that was felt throughout Christendom. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has referred to its disastrous effects on the unity of the Christian faith:

Even after Christ, Arius, the well-known patriarch, was the cause of a widespread schism in the Cause of God and intense agitation among the believers. His followers numbered even three million, and he as well as his successors exerted the utmost effort in order to produce a split and a widespread commotion in the religion of God.

Aside from naming Arius as a violator of Christianity, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá clearly indicates that Arius essentially used a theological pretext for achieving power, a connivance common to violators in all dispensations.

Arius was a learned priest from Alexandria who quarreled with his bishop, Alexander. The disputation began with Arius’ assertion that the Son, even as the Logos, the Divine Word, was inferior to the Father. He held that Christ, like other beings, was created ex nihilo by God and was, therefore, a created and finite being. He also argued that Christ had a beginning whereas the Father was eternal: “We are persecuted because we say the Sun has a beginning whereas God is without beginning.” Alexander took issue with Arius, holding to the orthodox belief that the Son as Logos was eternal, uncreated, and of the same essence or substance as God. The most serious offense of Arius’ teaching in orthodox eyes was its debasing subordination of Jesus. Arius argued that Christ was liable to change in regard to His divine nature and even to sin. The appellation “Son of God” was for the Arians a courtesy title rather than an indication of Christ’s divine origin.

Alexander summoned a provincial synod and had Arius excommunicated in A.D. 321. The banished Arius refused to submit and won a large following in Palestine. His supporters spread the controversy from Palestine all over the eastern Greek episcopates (bishoprics). Constantine, the newly converted Christian king, anxious to preserve the Empire from schism, summoned the first ecumenical council of the church at Nicaea, across the Bosphorus from Constantinople. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s commentary on Constantine speaks favorably of his great spirituality and administrative skill: “He spared no efforts, dedicating his life to the promotion of the principles of the Gospel, and he solidly

[Page 33] established the Roman government, which in reality had been nothing but a system of unrelieved oppression, on moderation and justice.” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s favorable assessment of Constantine is not shared by all historians, some of whom view his intervention in spiritual matters as a means of gaining ascendency over his political opponents.

The point at issue at Nicaea was whether Christ was simply like the Father, much in the same way as an image would resemble its perfect archetype, or whether He was of the same essence or substance as God, the very matter of Divinity. The 220 delegate bishops were separated quite literally by a mere letter of the Greek alphabet (Gk. homoousios ‘of the same substance’; homoiousios ‘of like substance’). Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria and his party defended Christ’s full divinity and coequality with the Father, a position deriving from Logos theology. Eusebius of Caeserea, “father of church history,” stood by the dictum “Sola Scriptura” and argued for the homoiousios since ousia (Gk. ‘substance, essence’) was not a biblical term at all but one drawn from Greek philosophy. Eusebius argued further that favoring the homoousios would risk compromising the sovereignty of God and his oneness.

Constantine took his stand against the Arians at Nicaea and argued forcefully in favor of the homoousios. The creed was adopted almost universally (only four bishops refused to sign it) and with great jubilation. The Jesus of Nazareth Who had begun His christological journey in the mind of the early church as the “suffering servant” messiah-figure of Deutero-Isaiah emerged from Nicaea as a deified being, consubstantial with God.

The promulgation of the Nicene Creed, far from bringing the spiritual peace that Constantine had sought, inaugurated a second stage of vitriolic struggle between Nicenes and Arians that was to rage for the next half century. During this second phase of the contest, the Arian party witnessed a momentary victory. By a series of skillful diplomatic maneuvers, Arian bishops were able to win the support of Constantius I, Constantine’s son and [Page 34] ruler of the eastern states, who abandoned his father’s policy of standing behind the Nicene Creed. At the Synod of Constantinople in A.D 360, held during the dedication of the Hagia Sophia, the Nicene Creed was abrogated and replaced with an Arian creed, declaring the Son to be simply “like the Father, as the Holy Scriptures call Him and teach.” It seemed that Christendom had gone Arian.

During this second phase of the Arian controversy a third force along with the Father and Son was introduced into the debate. This was the Holy Spirit. The turn of the century was destined to witness not only the destruction of the Arian party but also the formulation in church council of Christendom’s most central doctrine, the trinity.

The sources for the Christian belief in the Holy Spirit are Judaic. In the Bible the dynamic spirit of God (Heb. ruach Yahweh) was active especially at creation (Gen. 2:7) but was also evident in the mission of the Hebrew prophets who were sustained through God’s spirit and spoke through the authority of His Word: “Thus says the Lord.”

In early Christian literature this understanding was reflected in the writings of the apologist Justin Martyr who referred to the Holy Spirit as the “prophetic spirit.” The Fathers, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons; Tertullian of Carthage; and Origen of Alexandria had given place in their writings to the Holy Spirit in reference to the Godhead. By the fourth century a movement had been gradually building to deify the Holy Spirit. The writings of Hilary of Poitiers and especially those of the fourth-century Cappadocian fathers, St. Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzus, were instrumental in winning support for the teaching of a deified Holy Spirit. Augustine, building on a trinitarian tradition four centuries old, gave final expression to the doctrine by writing, over a twenty-year period, De Trinitate, a work setting forth arguments and analogies to explain the mystery of the trinity.

Judaism, however, was rigidly monotheistic. For the triune expression of the Godhead one must look to ancient Egypt. From the time of the Old Kingdom (2770-2270 B.C.) until Christian times, Osiris, one of the “Ennead” or Nine of the Egyptian pantheon of gods, was worshiped alternatively as three gods and as one. In his triune form, Osiris was worshiped as Serapis; Isis, the wife of Osiris; and Horus, their son. In a papyrus dating from the time of Alexander the Great the trinitarian formula, “Thus from one god I became three gods,” is recorded as Horus’ self-description. Tertullian of Carthage, also writing from North Africa, produced almost identical wording in his own formulation of the Christian trinity with his celebrated phrase [Page 35] All three are one.” Coincidentally, the strongest supporters of trinitarian theology, Athanasius and Cyril, were both bishops of Alexandria, the breeding ground of Egyptian tritheism. It is to this “Alexandrian cult” of the worship of the triune Osiris that Shoghi Effendi refers in his discussion of those movements that threatened the early church.

That the doctrine of the trinity itself underwent a historical development is readily apparent. It was to appear early in the writings of the Church Fathers and apologists, but its exegesis was by no means uniform. It was cautiously circumscribed in its early stages by a respect for Jewish monotheism but witnessed the gradual development of three divine and consubstantial persons within the Godhead. Justin Martyr, referred to earlier, formulated a triad of God, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. He wrote of the Word as being “another God” beside God. The Logos (Word) in time came to be superseded by the Son.

A contemporary of Justin, Theophilus of Antioch, was the first to use the word “triad” in his writings in relationship to the Godhead. Theophilus’ triad had a novel twist in that the Holy Spirit was replaced by Wisdom, to consist of Father, Son, and Wisdom. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, reaffirmed the triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching that the Son (Word) was in eternal generation and was, therefore, coexistent with the Father. Since He shared God’s eternity, Irenaeus argued that the Son was also God: “The Father is God and the Son is God, for whatsoever is begotten by God is God.” Hippolytus of Rome first used the word persona (Latin for ‘mask,’ as used in Greco-Roman theater; hence ‘appearance, manifestation, aspect’) in relation to the three aspects of the Godhead and taught that, although single, God was multiple in respect to His fourfold attributes of Word, Wisdom, Power, and Counsel. Tertullian of Carthage coined the famous “three in one” formula referred to above and was also the first to use the word trinitas in his writings, thereby giving impetus to the independent subsistence of the three divine persons.

The writings of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian constitute a watershed in the development of the trinity. It is in their writings that the first tensions appear between the unity of the divine monarchia and the independent subsistence of the three persons. Overall, however, the ascendancy was given to the Divine Unity with the three persons being “manifestations” (Lat. species) or “aspects” (Lat. formae) of the Godhead, a theology called “economic trinitarianism.” because it wished to stress the paucity of the three persons compared with the monarchia ‘Divine Unity.’ The major contribution [Page 36] of this theology was its vocabulary. The words persona and trinitas became standard for future discussions and took on meanings that were not originally intended by their authors.

This second phase of the Arian crisis, complicated by disputes over emerging trinitarian theology, necessitated the second ecumenical council of the church, held at Constantinople in A.D. 381. It was presided over by Emperor Theodosius I, a solid supporter of the Nicene Creed. At Constantinople trinitarian theology was formally canonized. It was laid down that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are all of the same substance but manifest themselves in three divine persons.

Following the Council of Constantinople, the Arian party, now divided into contending sects, collapsed with astonishing speed. As for Arius, fate was to decree that he would not live to see the momentary victory of his party. He died quite suddenly, in misery and obscurity, in the streets of Constantinople, possibly a victim of poisoning, having been discarded by his own party who had gone on to quarrel with the Nicenes:

He had been left out in the cold, almost forgotten. At length, sick and old, he had pleaded with Constantine to allow him the benefits of the sacraments before he died, sadly complaining that his powerful friends like Eusebius of Nicomedia could no longer be bothered to do anything for him.

To the circumstances of Arius’ unhappy ending an ominous ring is lent by the following comment of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that serves as warning to those who divide the religion of God for personal gain, regardless of their theologies: “But eventually the power of Christ exterminated and utterly destroyed them all to the extent that no trace (of them) has been left.”

The God-Man Debate—Cyril and Nestorius. Like the hydra of Greek mythology that grew a new head for each of its severed ones, the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople generated rather than silenced further controversy about the person of Jesus. Scarcely had the canonization of trinitarian theology taken place at the council of Constantinople when a new issue in the christological debate plunged the church deeper into dissension. This was the relationship between the divine and human natures of Jesus.

Not only did this new phase of the christological battle prove to be by far the most bloody, but it also had fatal consequences for the unity of the Byzantine Empire. A new and divisive force was added to the dimensions of the theological quarreling—the expression of nascent nationalism. The aspiration toward national autonomy in Syria and Egypt found expression in theological creeds that were used as a tool to throw off the imperial mantle of [Page 37] Constantinople. These potent movements of religious nationalism spelled permanent schism for the church, and the dislocation of a once proud empire, making it easy for the Muslim conqueror in the seventh century to overrun. The quasi-miraculous preservation of church unity that had prevailed during the Arian crisis finally failed under the onslaught of these new separatist forces.

The quarrel flared up initially between two patriarchs of great rival sees, Nestorius of Constantinople and Cyril of Alexandria. Both men had proved to be unduly harsh in their treatment of dissident groups, and their confrontation had disastrous effects for the church.

Nestorius had been called by Theodosius II from his native see of Antioch to serve as preacher to the court of Constantinople. Nestorius’ Christology is sometimes referred to as “duophysitism” or two-natured Christology (Gk. physis ‘nature’) since he believed that the divine and human natures of Jesus operated in a loosely knit unity or “conjunction,” as he wrote. But as a learned exponent of antiochene theology Nestorius laid emphasis on the humanity of Jesus, a long-standing tradition reflective of its Judaic origins. For Nestorius Christ’s humanity was crucial to his soteriological role. To win the salvation of men Christ had made use of His free will and the power of His rational soul, attributes He shared with other men. His sacrifice was not compelled. Christ wanted to show the ordinary believer that salvation could be won only by willingly accepting God’s will, as He Himself had willingly accepted the cross.

At the heart of the controversy between Cyril and Nestorius was the philosophical problem of reconciling duality with oneness. Any talk of a two-natured Jesus was unsettling to Cyril and his Alexandrian school. Nestorius’ emphasis on the humanity of Jesus led Cyril to charge him with denying the divinity of Christ. Nestorius’ too careful distinctions between the divinity and manhood of Jesus led Cyril to charge that Nestorius had in a sense mutilated the unity of Christ’s person that had been fused through the Logos. Cyril’s teaching is usually referred to as “Monophysite” since it stressed one nature in Jesus, His divinity. For Cyril there was no such thing as Christ’s humanity in the ordinary sense. All His human attributes were divine, since they served as vehicles for the Logos, Christ’s eternal divinity. Cyril carried the implications of his beliefs to the extreme. The baby Jesus was nothing less than God in the flesh and Mary the Gk. theotokos ‘mother of God,’ a notion that was for him sacrosanct. Unlike Nestorius, who argued that the humanity and divinity [Page 38] of Jesus were distinct, Cyril argued that they formed a “hypostatic union,” a God-Man union, not unlike the platonic unity of body and soul, “the single unique Christ out of two different natures.” Cyril’s teaching contributed in large measure to the theology of the incarnation.

The distinctions between the two theologies were, indeed, dubious. As often happens in confrontations, ironically, the disputants seemed to be saying exactly the same thing, “one out of both,” for Cyril, and “twofold in his being God and man,” for Nestorius. It was hair-splitting theology at its worst, suiting perfectly Christ’s characterization of pharisaic discussions as “straining at a gnat” and “swallowing a camel” (Math 23:24). There were clearly other motives at work than a sheer concern for theological truth.

The quarrel escalated with an exchange of pastoral letters between the patriarchs. Having won the support of Pope Celestine and convinced that he would be vindicated at a general council of the church, Cyril used his influence on Emperor Theodosius II to summon the third world council of the church at Ephesus in A.D. 431. While inclement weather delayed the arrival of Nestorius’ delegation, Cyril and sixty Alexandrian bishops went ahead and unilaterally excommunicated Nestorius, “the new Judas.” A tragicomedy ensued. Upon arriving four days later Nestorius and his delegation held their own rival synod and excommunicated Cyril and his ally, Memnon, the Bishop of Ephesus. The exasperated emperor confirmed the excommunications of the rival councils and ordered both Cyril and Nestorius out of office.

In a turnabout Nestorius’ Oriental bishops withdrew their support after learning of his excommunication, something he must have felt as a cruel betrayal. Banished to the Egyptian desert, Nestorius died a solitary and tragic figure in A.D. 450. Cyril, through bribery at the court, retained his bishopric until his death in A.D. 444. It was Cyril’s theology that was ultimately declared canonic at Ephesus.

The successors to both parties persisted in their fanaticism, thus necessitating a second council at Ephesus in A.D. 449, dubbed “The Robber Synod” by Pope Leo I. Here the princes of the Monophysite Egyptian church resorted to murder to vindicate their theology. The Nestorian patriarch of Constantinople, Flavian, was arbitrarily condemned, dragged from the altar by a group of Alexandrian monks, and beaten so badly that he died within days. The same church councils that the fathers had insisted were inspired by the breaths of the Holy Spirit had now become the arena for the murder of a patriarch.” His crime was that he had subscribed to a different theology.

[Page 39] The murder of Flavian threatened not only the unity of the church but the Byzantine Empire itself. In a last-ditch attempt to preserve the church-state from schism, the fourth ecumenical council was convened at Chalcedon, near Constantinople, in A.D. 451. Its aim was to produce a universal christological statement that would weld together the Egyptian Monophysite and Nestorian theologies of the church thereby subduing the flames of separatism that threatened to disrupt the Empire. Subsequent history revealed, however, that the factions were unwilling to compromise.

The theological formula produced at Chalcedon was that of divine incarnation. It stated in its basic outline that Christ was both perfect God and perfect man, made known in two distinct natures in a hypostatic union without confusion or admixture. Of necessity the Chalcedon formula had to be a compromise mosaic of the theologies of Antioch and Alexandria. Statements of Roman theology were also written in.

As a compromise, however, Chalcedon failed to please the churches either of Egypt or Syria. Monophysite Egypt rejected Chalcedon. Adopting “one nature” as her new creed, the church of Egypt, after a series of bloody revolts, broke with Constantinople in A.D. 575 and formed a separate church, now known as the Coptic Church. In Syria imperial forces from Constantinople restored order only after a bloody battle with armed Monophysite monks. Jacob Baradaeus founded the Syrian Jacobite church by traveling around the country disguised as a beggar and ordaining Monophysite bishops. The followers of Nestorius later migrated to Persia, from where they sent missionaries to India, Ceylon, and even as far as China.

The alienation had grown so great between Copt and Greek orthodox that the Christians of Egypt threw open the gates of their cities to the Muslim invaders in A.D. 641, welcoming them as liberators from the sway of Constantinople. Like the blowing sands of the Arabian desert from which it was borne, Islám quietly buried the religious war waged between the Greek Orthodox and Egyptian Monophysite Christians.

A Bahá’í Perspective on the Deification of Jesus

I DO NOT INTEND that the foregoing should be taken merely as a lesson in the contortions of early Christian theology. Along with the specifics of the deity of Jesus, about which more shall be said, the christological controversies lead us to a greater understanding of the problems of a growing religion.

The early church fell into disharmony and ultimately warfare over the person of Jesus because of three closely related factors: (1) the lack of a unified system of belief; (2) the lack of a clearly authorized interpretation of doctrine; and (3) the lack of clearly defined roles in the administration of the churches. It might prove of interest to compare these Christian developments with parallel elements in the Bahá’í Faith.

During the first century, Christians had no canonical scripture. The Old [Page 40] Testament in the Septuagint version continued to be used as the only authorized Holy Writ. The teachings of Jesus circulated in diverse oral traditions throughout the communities. The church recognized the necessity of a fixed New Testament canon to combat the Gnostic heresies, but no order of books was agreed upon until the end of the second century. Even with the tentative fixing of the canon the Arian crisis raised once more the question of authoritative doctrine. Without a clearly designated interpreter of Christ’s teachings, individual bishops put forth their own interpretations of christological questions as inspired by the Holy Spirit and made their teachings binding upon the faithful in their care, bringing about confrontations between bishops. Another complicating factor was the role of philosophy. By the time of the Arian schism philosophy was in the mainstream of the intellectual life of the church. The fathers used philosophical concepts and schemes to elucidate and buttress theological argument. This naturally involved a great deal of speculation and individual interpretation that ultimately fostered heresy. The key word in the Nicene Creed homoousios was borrowed from philosophy. How different from the earlier days of the church when only New Testament teaching had been the rule, as it was in the struggle with the Gnostics, who had proven themselves masters in “esoterica.”

The excessive decentralization of the church only exacerbated the fragmentation over doctrinal issues. Until the time that Pope Leo I (440-61) asserted the primacy of Rome over other sees, bishops were on an equal footing as sole rulers of their congregations. When Nestorius and Cyril waged theological warfare, the whole congregations of Constantinople and Alexandria were perforce brought into the fray, and no supreme head was able to compose differences. The Bahá’í Faith, on the contrary, has been fortunate enough, by virtue of its written covenants, to have had only one clearly designated leader at any given time in its history as well as, from the very beginnings of the Revelation, a written body of scripture that was universally accepted. Its administrative order strives to strike the balance between the excesses of overcentralization and decentralization. Generally speaking, in the Bahá’í Faith, institutional expansion has followed in an orderly fashion the transmission of the Revelation. In the early Christian church the institutions were being expanded while doctrinal and scriptural questions were being completed in the midst of major schism. In the Bahá’í Faith “Unity of doctrine” was maintained from the very beginning by authentic texts of scripture as well as their authorized interpretation by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi. “Unity of administration” is assured by the Universal House of Justice.

[Page 41] The christological controversies reveal the tragedy of religious controversy. Contrived beliefs in the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit in church council justified fratricidal warfare waged on fellow Christians because they did not share the same theology. One is also struck by the gap between Christian morality and theology, between virtue and learning. How different from Bahá’u’lláh’s teaching in which the teacher’s divine wisdom can only be reflected to the degree that he practices the spiritual virtues recommended by the Manifestation. Bahá’u’lláh has warned of the destructive force in religious dissension: “Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.” Even the mighty Constantine could not still the roaring flames of the Arian schism. The fatal consequences of the God-man debate for the Byzantine Empire have already been alluded to. At the same time, Bahá’u’lláh reminds us of the essential purpose of religion so denatured by religious strife: “Oh people of the world! The religion of God is to create love and unity; do not make it the cause of enmity and discord.” Further, in “The First Glad Tidings,” Bahá’u’lláh specifically abolishes religious warfare, which had been accepted in previous dispensations. In the “Tablet of the World” Bahá’u’lláh abrogates what He calls the “four words,” all of which figured in the christological controversies: (1) “Destroying men’s lives”; (2) “Burning the Books”; (3) “Shunning other nations”; and (4) “Exterminating other communities.”

Bahá’u’lláh’s prohibition of religious discord and His exhortations to fellowship are not only for the purposes of maintaining the social peace. They have a much deeper impact on the epistemological implications of mankind’s intellectual life. As I see it, harmony and unity in religion are the preconditions that will lead man to the discovery of new spiritual truths. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written: “The fact that we imagine ourselves to be right and everybody else wrong is the greatest of all obstacles in the path towards unity, and unity is essential if we would reach Truth, for Truth is one.” This quotation suggests a plurality of meanings in any theological construct or dialogue.

The other lesson to be gained from the christological controversies is that man must recognize the limitations of his own knowledge. Christians allowed themselves to tamper with highly abstract, speculative theological issues that were clearly beyond their capacity to comprehend. The first four ecumenical councils of the church necessitated by the controversies reveal a deep-seated preoccupation with definition and analysis as a solution to doctrinal issues. Where the requisite spiritual attributes are lacking, this approach is clearly [Page 42] not a means of solution. The leaders of the church passed beyond the bounds of “intellectual honesty and humility” and put forth doctrines that reflected their own imperfect understanding as perfect reflections at the will of the Holy Spirit. Bahá’ís have also been warned about the same dangers: “In past dispensations many errors arose because the believers in God’s revelation were overanxious to encompass the Divine Message within the framework of their limited understanding . . . to argue that something was true because it appeared desirable and necessary.”

Christian affirmations about the divinity of Jesus would warrant several observations. First, it seems clear that the deification of Jesus belies the oft-repeated Christian affirmation that revelation is static. The deification issue evolved as a historical process, both biblically and in the creeds. New Testament exegesis of Christ’s earliest christological titles as the “Suffering Servant” and the “True Prophet” contrasted with later incarnation theology clearly indicates this. The Apostles’ Creed, the first of the extrabiblical creeds, devised by the church of Rome as a reaction to Gnosticism, in no way even hints at Christ’s identification with the Godhead. The deification itself did not occur until Nicaea in A.D. 325, the doctrine being later ratified as trinitarian theology at Constantinople in A. D. 381.

Though it would be quite wrong in Bahá’í terms to subordinate Christ to other mythological redeemers as the Gnostic heresy had done, one can still clearly discern how much of the Gnostic theological substratum Paul used in his own presentation of Christ. Paul’s thematic presentation of the fall of man and his enslavement to the evil powers, “rulers of this age” (1 Cor. 2:8), and his victorious redemption by the Christ savior, all reveal features of a cosmic drama that is quite Gnostic.

It was the Arian schism, however, that brought the whole question of Christ’s divinity into the forefront of the debate. It is tempting for Bahá’ís to see in Arius an ally of the Bahá’í view that basically subordinates the prophetic figure to God. Upon closer examination, however, Arius’ subordinationist Christology reveals itself to be at variance with Bahá’í teaching. Unlike Arius who taught that Christ was properly a phenomenon, a created and finite Being, Bahá’í theology teaches that the Divine Manifestations are eternal in their station of the Logos—that is, preexistent to their human condition. Naturally, the physical vehicle is phenomenal like that of other men. Bahá’í teaching also holds to the “essential sinlessness” of the Divine Manifestation, whereas Arius indicated that Christ was liable not to change alone but also to sin.

The three major councils of the church—Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon —that evolved successively the deification, trinitarian, and incarnation [Page 43] aspects of Christian doctrine all have the common and objectionable feature of compromising the Divine Unity. The Divine Unity is one of the “major beliefs” of the Bahá’í Faith, “the integrity of which,” Shoghi Effendi states, “no one of its followers should allow to be compromised.” All of these creeds tampered with the Divine Unity by recasting Christ’s relationship to the Father in its pagan mythological meaning, which was that God had generated offspring. The wording of the creeds, as well as Cyril’s pantheistic theotokos (mother of God) clearly indicate this. Bahá’u’lláh, however, specifically rejects the belief that the Manifestation of God can somehow share in God’s essence as the homoousisos of Nicaea held, or co-inhabit the Divine essence in a triune Godhead as the Constantinopolitan doctrine of trinity maintained: “If any be set up by His side as peers, if they be regarded as identical with His Person, how can it, then, be maintained that the Divine Being is One and Incomparable, that His Essence is indivisible and peerless” (my emphasis)? As for the incarnation, first outlined in Paul’s theology and canonized at Chalcedon, it has been qualified by Shoghi Effendi as a “crude and fantastic” “theory.”

The question then is raised. If Christ is not all these things, what in the Bahá’í understanding is He? Only the briefest outline can be offered here; but the answer, I believe, is clearly in complete harmony both with Gospel teaching and with much Christian scholarship. Paul’s writings do not constitute divine revelation for a Bahá’í. This, of course, would meet with major objections from Christians who believe that all scripture is divinely inspired (2 Tim. 3:16).

The Bahá’í writings indicate that each Divine Manifestation is “known by a different name” and “fulfills a definite mission.” Bahá’í recognition of Christ’s sonship would apply equally to “Son of Man,” the more common of the titles used by Christ, and to the term “Son of God.” As I pointed out earlier, Christ is “Son of God” not in any mythological sense as in a sharing of God’s divine essence but in terms of His messiahship or spiritual kingship. Christians have fastened almost exclusively upon the mythological meaning of the term, that Christ is God’s offspring, and have ignored the counterpart implied in the term, that the “Son” is one who above all shows obedience and humility to the Father—that is, the “Son” does the Father’s will. The term “Son of Man” contains paradoxical assertions that the Christ figure would achieve the redemption of mankind by suffering a humiliating death and yet at the same time indicates a cosmological figure of paramount importance who would usher in a spiritual kingdom promised from the beginning of the world. The Bahá’í writings are in harmony with these views since they recognize the sacrificial death of Jesus “as a ransom for the sins and iniquities of all of the [Page 44] peoples of the earth” and His having ushered in a spiritual kingdom.

The later Christian obsession with Christ as God, due mainly to the theology of Paul and the councils, is belied by the New Testament itself, which reveals a variety of christological titles. The Christ figure of the New Testament, notwithstanding the preeminence of the title of sonship, is depicted as a mosaic of christological images, each with its own history rooted in a different tradition. For early Christians Christ was the True Prophet, the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah (Heb. ebed Yahweh ‘the Righteous One’). There are also traditions of Jesus as the High Priest, Jesus as Lord, and so on. Such a mosaic is consistent with Bahá’u’lláh’s explanation that the prophetic figure reveals a wide range of spiritual attributes, from the state of servitude at one end of the scale, “a servitude the like of which no man can possibly attain,” and covering successively the stages of Apostleship, Guardianship, Messengership, Prophethood, Lordship, reaching ultimately to Divinity, “the Call of God Himself.”

In addition to this prophetic mission, Bahá’í teaching points to the preexistent or metaphysical reality of Christ. However, rather than restricting this preexistent reality to Jesus alone, Bahá’í scripture attributes it to all of the Founders of the world’s great religions. This is the reality of the Divine Word (Logos) or Divine Manifestation: “Therefore the reality of prophethood, which is the Word of God and the perfect state of manifestation, did not have any beginning, and will not have any end. . . .” Not only does Bahá’í teaching accord with the preexistence of the Word as stated in the prologue to St. John’s Gospel (John 1), but also Christian scholarship has interpreted the passage to mean that the Logos means God’s self-revelation, a view that coincides perfectly with Bahá’í teaching.

Further, the hellenistic notions of the term, which are implicit in John’s usage, are also pertinent to the comparative aspects of the two religions. For the pre-Socratics and the Stoics as well as the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, the Logos was an intermediary between God and man. For the [Page 45] Gnostics the Logos as intermediary was finally personalized in the form of a Savior. There are direct parallels here with Bahá’í belief, which also points to the Divine Word as an intermediary between God and man. However, one reservation must he stated here. John’s Gospel depicts the very act of creation as being ascribed to the Logos. In Bahá’í teaching God is the creator.

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Remembering the Master

A REVIEW OF RAMONA ALLEN BROWN’S Memories of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Recollections of the Early Days of the Bahá’í Faith in California (WILMETTE, IL.: BAHÁ’Í PUBLISHING TRUST, 1980) XXIII + 122 PAGES, NOTES, INDEX

BY FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

HOW DOES ONE REVIEW memoirs when they have been written by a woman one has known since one was a teenager and whose kindness, devotion, steadiness, and humor one has experienced firsthand? Should one set up formal criteria appropriate to the criticism of all autobiography? Should one demand that the author attempt to match Henry Adams’ or Leo Tolstoy’s descriptions of childhood and intellectual maturation? Or does one settle back in a comfortable chair, as I did years ago in Ramona Brown’s apartment in Oakland, and listen to her tell stories of “the early days” in the Bay Area, stories that always led up to the paramount experience of her life: meeting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá?

Such questions have no single answer. This book is not an autobiography, nor is it a history. It is not richly documented. It does not set the early Bahá’ís of the West Coast in the cultural context of their time and place. It is episodic, providing only glimpses of people about whom one would like to know so much more. If one’s sojourn in the San Francisco Bay Area overlapped Ramona’s, one would miss in her pages many mutual friends. Bijou Straun is there, but where is Lucy Marshall, whom many suspected of being an angel disguised as a little old lady?

No matter. Ramona’s memoirs cannot be judged by what they omit, by what they fail to do, by what they are not. These are her memories of times and people who are and will always remain important to Bahá’ís.

At the center of the book stands ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He not only dominates it but gives it meaning and significance. It is fascinating how at His touch a Bahá’í community comes into being on the farthest edge of the world. The earliest recipients of Baha’u’llah’s message in America had access to little information about the Faith. It was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá who transmitted to them its spiritual reality. It was their love of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá that transformed a few dozen disparate individuals into apostles of a new world religion and inspired them in their struggles to lay the foundations of the Bahá’í community not only in America but over much the world.

Glimpses of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá are the most precious part of Ramona’s book. She conveys her memories of the Master vividly and precisely because they remained forever fresh in her mind. This she shared with other Bahá’ís and with many non-Bahá’ís as well, who had met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and could not forget Him no matter how long they lived. I saw the look of admiration and respect in the eyes of Professor Albert L. Guerard, one of my teachers at Stanford and not a Bahá’í, as he, on learning that I was one, told me in 1945 of hearing ‘Abdu’l-Bahá speak on campus thirty-three years before. The same expression appeared on the face of “Prof.” Rogers, Principal of the Montezuma School for Boys and a Bahá’í only in the broadest sense of the term. As for an Ella Cooper, a Fujita, a John Bosch—strong and devoted disciples of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá—they lived the rest of their lives in His invisible presence that gave them a depth and a luminosity that overcame quirks of personality and minor failures, making it possible for each in his or her own way to transmit the experience of having known ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to those of [Page 47] us who had been born too late. I am indebted to them and to others like them in Ṭihrán, London, New York, and Boston, for letting me see in their eyes and hear in their voices the emotions evoked in them by the Master.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 1912. He found there a small but dedicated Bahá’í community that had come into existence a decade or so earlier through the efforts of Thornton Chase, Lua Getsinger, Ann Apperson and her aunt Phoebe Hearst, Helen Goodall and her daughter Ella, and others. Ramona met Helen and Ella Goodall in 1904, when she was only fifteen years old. “That was the most important day of my life,” she recorded half a century later. “I sat spellbound, listening to those friends speaking about that wonderful Person, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. . . .” Her enlightenment was instantaneous: “I turned to my mother and said, ‘I believe this!’ for I had instantly accepted Bahá’u’lláh and His Teachings and knew that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was the spiritual Teacher for this day. . . .”

Ramona came to know and established friendships with many outstanding early Bahá’ís. She became part of a group of young girls who were taught by “Aunt Ella” Goodall, later Cooper. Aunt Ella affectionately called them her peaches, they called her “Mother Peach,” and the whole group was known as the “Peach Tree.” She met Thornton Chase, the first American Bahá’í; Kanichi Yamamoto, the first Bahá’í of Japanese origin; Saichiro Fujita; John Bosch; Agnes Alexander; Martha Root; and many others whose names have become familiar to Bahá’ís throughout the world.

The magnet that attracted and held them all in place was ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Ramona’s family anxiously awaited His coming to California. He arrived in San Francisco on 3 October 1912. That same day Ramona, her brother, and her parents—Dr. and Mrs. Allen —came to pay their respects at 1815 California Street, where ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was staying.

For a moment we stood at the open door. I knew as I stood there that I expected to see an angel from Heaven. And I did! I saw the Master! He came toward us, a wonderful smile on His saintly face, extending His outstretched arms to us and saying in Persian, “Welcome! Welcome!”

. . . As we entered the presence of the Master, He appeared to be enveloped in a beautiful, ethereal, luminous light. The room seemed flooded with sunshine.

No one has succeeded in describing ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Ramona says only that His carriage was majestic and His posture remarkable. “He was strong and vibrant. He walked lightly, so that there were moments when He seemed hardly to touch the ground.” He enjoyed walking. He wore a low turban, an abá, and soft leather shoes. “To the astonishment of each person who talked with Him, His eyes seemed to change color as He spoke.”

During His stay in California, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gave many talks at churches, synagogues, clubs, and universities. Ramona heard a number of these talks and reproduces passages from some of them in her book. Though available elsewhere, they fit the pattern [Page 48] of her reminiscences, adding to them a touch of certitude. Some of the statements attributed to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá either have not been or cannot be authenticated, but apocrypha pose no threat to Bahá’ís since no words attributed to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá carry authority unless they can be verified by comparison with a text written or dictated and signed by Him.

Among passages that to my knowledge have not yet been authenticated is the report of a discussion ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had in San Francisco on 21 October with three medical doctors who asked about the nature of healing. Was spiritual healing possible? If it was, why bother with medicine, why use imperfect material means instead of relying on prayer? ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explained that there was no contradiction between the spiritual and the material methods of healing. Both should be applied, and neither is fully effective without the other. “Pray and give medicine too,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is reported to have said, indirectly reaffirming the principle of harmony of religion and science.

Ramona Brown’s memoirs are colorful, rich in anecdote, and permeated with love for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and for all people. Reading this well-edited, well-produced volume, and looking at the photographs, one is grateful to the author, the editor, and the Bahá’í Publishing Trust for giving us a book that will help preserve the spirit of the early days of the Bahá’í Faith in America.

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Authors & Artists

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH is a professor of history at Yale University and Editor of World Order.

JACK McLEAN holds a degree in French literature from the Sorbonne and degrees from the University of Ottawa and Toronto in religious studies. He graduated with distinction in the M.A. program at the University of Ottawa with a degree in comparative religion and is entering tbe doctoral program in religious studies at the same university. His “The Knowledge of God: An Essay on Baha'i Epistemology” appeared in our Spring 1978 issue. Mr. McLean is a high school teacher of religion and ethics.

NOSRATOLLAH RASSEKH is a professor of history at Lewis and Clark College. He holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in political science, international relations, and history from Stanford University. His varied contributions to World Order include: “Melting Pot or Boiling Cauldron: The Ethnic Experience in America” (Winter 1975-76); “Of Time, Space, and Man: Reflections on Progressive Revelation” (Summer 1974); and “The Non-Hero in History” (Fall 1967). Among his other publications are A Bibliography of Persian Gulf Sheikdoms and White Revolution of Írán.

LEN ROBERTS is an instructor of journalism and American literature at Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania. He holds an M.A. degree from the University of Dayton and is completing a Ph.D. at Lehigh University, with a dissertation on Allan Tate. His poems have appeared in a number of journals; his first poem was published in World Order in Summer 1975.

ART CREDITS: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by David L. Trautman; p. 1, photograph by Lori Block; p. 3, photograph by Mark T. Budig; p. 6, photograph by Kurt Hein; p. 22, photograph by Camille O'Reilly.

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