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Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, And Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe For The Next 1,500 Years (2010)

by Philip Jenkins(Favorite Author)

3.7 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0061768944 (ISBN13: 9780061768941)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

HarperOne

review 1: A kind of prequel to his outstanding The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — and How It Died, an historical account of Christian churches in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and points east, Philip Jenkins, professor of history at Baylor University and Co-Director for Baylor's Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion, has produced an equally outstanding and well-written account of the little-known Christology controversy of the 5th and later centuries that ripped Christianity into violent factions and established what mainstream Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, and most Protestants) believe to this day. After establishing the Trinity as a core belief of Christia... morenity in the 4th century, the next all-consuming argument concerned the identity of Jesus, the main contours being: was he both human and divine, as proclaimed at the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, or did he only have one divine nature? There were numerous nuances of each position that had their supporters, but this was the main general issue. Each side was represented by popes and patriarchs, emperors and empresses, theologians and the masses. The One Nature advocates were primarily the patriarchs of Alexandria and the Two Nature supporters were patriarchs from Antioch. The battleground was control of the patriarchy of Constantinople, the second most important post after the Roman papacy. Ironically, only one pope was able to exert much influence on the debate, Leo the Great, and even he was kept on the sideline at the infamous Council of Gangsters of 449 in Ephesus. The One Nature crowd, using violent gangs and forceful intimidation at this council, thought they were triumphant. But the death the following year of the Eastern emperor, Theodosius II, who believed the One Nature account, and the support of Pope Leo, among others, led to the Council of Chalcedon where the creed of the 4th century councils at Nicaea and Constantinople were affirmed. Unfortunately, this did not settle matters, and it took another couple hundred years where the two views see-sawed in dominance and bishops met at several more councils before the Two Nature belief triumphed. The struggle over this controversy contributed to the downfall of the eastern empire (the western empire had already dissolved by 476) as it helped, along with constant barbarian invasions, exhaust the empire’s resources and energy to defend against the Islamic attack in the 7th century. As it turned out, the One Nature backers, which now included the Antiochans, were able to more easily follow their beliefs under Islam than they were under the Roman Empire, at least for a few centuries. One of the striking aspects of this conflict, as Jenkins points out, was its resemblance to religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries and to the religious battles in contemporary Asia, especially the Muslim insurgencies against American occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Interestingly, he points out that there are far more references in the Old Testament to justified killing and even genocide than exhortation to violence in the Koran. Compared to the Old Testament, the Koran is almost a hippy-dippy text.) In late antiquity, the tongues of opponents, even if they were bishops, were cut off, as were right arms. Assassinations were too common, and tens of thousands of Christians died battling other Christians. Jenkins concludes in his last chapter that aspiring for theological purity cannot justify such monstrous atrocities. He makes the case for tolerating religious diversity. Given his Christian faith (according to Wikipedia he converted to Episcopalianism from Catholicism), it isn’t surprising that he dismisses doubts that Jesus is God, that such a view is the harbor for cynics. Still, he admits that the Scriptures in general and the Gospels in particular are inconsistent in their narratives about Jesus’s life. To a more objective reader it appears that the evidence for Christ’s divinity is pretty thin, and that makes the struggle for asserting his alleged true identity even more tragic.
review 2: Recycled stories from church history make entertaining reading, but this book has serious shortcomings. Jenkins is overly sympathetic to monophysitism, and at times appears to misunderstand both Chalcedon's formulations and the positions of those it opposed. He also likens the violence of the Byzantine age to the cruelty of Islam, and apparently believes that Islam's murderous violence is not, in fact, in the warp and woof of its Koran or the root of its history. less

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