Did Christianity invent theology?

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Of course not. I’m curious as to where this question comes from. But it’s a nice opportunity to discuss the concept. And I can then explicate on what Christianity brought to the table in those regards.

Theology is a rational accounting of belief. Before we had scientific and philosophical modes of thought, which give the word ‘belief’ its modern meaning, we had the theological.

Any time you gather a significant number of humans into the same place, their interactions are going to start going along patterns. These patterns interact with each other and produce culture. A necessary component of culture is shared ideas on what the group thinks is true. It’s important for everyone in a group to have similar ideas on what’s true, otherwise chaos reigns.

Since prehistoric humans didn’t have microscopes and spent most of their day doing resource gathering, their ideas about what’s true were extremely imaginative. Children today still consider the world in terms of their imagination. If you ever get a chance, watch a group of children while they’re playing. Each group makes its own culture, an amalgamation of all the varied personalities in the group.

As the groups get larger and larger, the need for everyone to be on the same page grows. Tribal methods of ensuring order just don’t work once the groups get large enough. But the groups have to keep getting larger otherwise your small group is vulnerable to attack from larger ones.

Enter culture and religion. Keeping everyone on the same page requires being able to answer anybody’s questions about the shared belief. Elaborate traditions are created out of this need. Practices like animal, and even human, sacrifice were real and practiced all over the world. The traditions had to give people the ability to make sense of their lives and of the fact that some people have more than others.

Theology starts coming into play once people start writing these things down. Written records greatly amplify a society’s ability to organize. More organization means more efficient war. More efficient war means that more lands can be brought under control, more humans to feed your civilization. More lands under control means more peace.

But with peace brings people who are willing to threaten it from the inside. If you don’t like the way things are being run, and you can convince a merry band of revolutionaries to overturn the existing social order, then you can throw a huge monkey wrench into the works.

Since these aren’t external threats, you can’t just raise an army to mitigate them. Most of these threats came from the army! So instead you need ever more elaborate rationales to cover all the different ways you might seek to upend the order with. These ideas got spread all throughout the ancient world and so you tend to see vaguely similar mythologies all across the world.

So ancient civilizations would differ largely along the lines of geography and population density. Most theologies were extremely tied to the land and to heredity. Today we call this henotheism. Everybody had their god, or deity, each deity had its own theology, its written and oral traditions for how the societies related to it. There wasn’t really any reason to disacknowledge the existence of other deities.

The specific reasons and process for this are lost to the sands of time, but for some reason, the Jews were the first to develop the idea of monotheism, that their’s was the only god. The specifics of what is now called Abrahamic theology started to emerge some 3000 years ago.

Civilization itself was thousands of years old at this point, Egypt just to the south was long in decline by the time the Jews started to separate out from the earlier Canaanites. Records were written down by the Jews on papyrus, very very little of it survives to this day. We know more about civilizations that wrote on stone or clay, such as the Babylonians.

So it’s unclear as to how or why the Jews developed monotheism, but given how history played out, it’s not super-unreasonable to believe that it’s exactly as the Jews say it happened. There is in fact one God, and that God chose the Jews to reveal Himself to. All the other gods are just imaginations, helpful to point at the divine, but not actually divine.

The Jewish culture and religion survived in the region despite many wars for over a thousand years. When it ran into the unstoppable juggernaut of Roman empire, hundreds of years of conflict ensued. Christianity was not just a man, a myth, and a legend, it was a cultural response to the question plaguing the Jews, how to preserve their identity in the face of ever-greater threats.

In the beginning, the biggest threat to Christianity was other Jews. Then the Jews started really pissing off the Romans, who proceeded to sack the Second Temple, raze it to the ground, and slaughter all the Jews they could find. Jews fought as hard as they could to preserve their way of life, only to get crushed under the heel of the Romans. It would be Christians who would keep the history of the region alive, the books of the Maccabees are not in the Jewish Bible, that history was lost to them.

Those books, telling the story of the Maccabees, rulers of a short-lived Jewish kingdom, are essential to understanding the historical genesis of Christianity, why Jesus was indeed the savior they were looking for, why so many Jews threw their lots in with Jesus even though Jesus represented an end to their ambitions of self-rule. Those ambitions were never going to end well.

The theology of early Christianity reflects the history. Jesus insisted that he was the son of God, and that Jews submit to Him. He traveled and performed faith healings. He reinterpreted Jewish law. The Jews would have their kingdom, but it would be a spiritual kingdom, not an Earthly one. He taught the Jews how the laws and commandments handed down by God were to be truly interpreted, in a spiritual fashion, not a legalistic one.

He extolled the virtues of peace to a populace boiling with anger, giddy with the desire to revolt against foreign rule and make a kingdom of their own, maybe even an empire! To them, the Maccabees didn’t go far enough. They weren’t strong enough. They weren’t violent enough.

These Jews hated Jesus so much, what he taught, what he stood for, that they dragged him to Pontius Pilate and demanded he be executed. Accounts vary, even among the gospels, but the Romans had no reason to execute a man preaching peace. Enough Jews had to make the demand to force Pilate’s hand. And so Jesus was executed.

I could give more historical flavor here, particularly about Pilate himself, but instead I’ll leave a link for the curious and get on with talking about theology.

The later theology of what would become the Catholic Church seems strange and curious. What’s with all these angels and devils? You could be forgiven for thinking that this sort of stuff is what theology is and so it must have been Christians that invented it. But Jews had this sort of thing lurking in old stories and folktales too. Jesus was accused of sorcery, the Jews had to have had a conception of what sorcery was if they were going to accuse Jesus of it and put him on trial for it.

Jesus wasn’t afraid to talk about the afterlife and what it was like. He told many stories of heaven and hell, assuredly more than the ones that made into the New Testament. These crazy fantasies reflect the need of the human mind to make sense of the infinite. Nobody has a full picture of what the afterlife really looks like and there’s very little evidence for it and certainly no proof of anything.

Jesus drew connections between heaven and hell and showed people how to bring heaven down to Earth, offering his services as a mediator. He prayed with people, showing them how to look within for God. The divine didn’t have to stay “out there,” it could be within as well as without.

The Jews already had a conception of “walking with God,” and their system of covenant managed the relationship between Jews and their deity. Jesus introduced them to the idea that they didn’t just have to approach God through following his rules. They could have a personal relationship with Him.

There are few things more fascinating and satisfying to study than the story of how an obscure, backwater, but proud people, managed to spawn a culture that remade the Western world in its image. But that’s what happened.