Vespasian & the Fall of Jerusalem

A History of Mankind (254)

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Christian accounts of Paul’s missionary journeys in Greece and Asia Minor, included in the Bible’s Acts, highlight the opposition and hostility of many Jewish communities. Various authorities are said to have investigated and perhaps interrogated Paul before his final, fateful arrest in Rome, including the vassal King Herod Agrippa II of Judaea, but Roman magistrates frequently struggled to find fault with one particular sect, among so many in the empire.

To a large extent, early Christianity was a triumph of Hellenized Judaism, which is what Christianity came down to: when, in the Book of Romans, Paul gives a speech in the midst of Athens’ Areopagus, he tells the Greeks that his God is the one they have always tried to find in empty temples; he quotes Greek poets (Epimenides and Aratus) rather than Jewish scriptures and he calls on them not to convert to his religion, but to return to their own in the Christian shape¹, to resume the search for divinity in place of sacralized Atheism.

Centuries of struggle between Semitic purists (the pharisees often mocked and attacked in the Christian scriptures) and worldlier Jews willing to accept deep religious reforms ended with what amounted to a refurbished Jewish religion, adapted for the use of all mankind. And this was at the time less of a stretch than it would seem: classical-era Jews themselves, never given to modesty, claimed that all of mankind descended from their beloved ancestors through the bottleneck presented by Noah's Ark, which is unique among tribal religions of the time, rarely – if ever – concerned with how other peoples showed up in the world.