God. Again, creativity was connected to the shift to a new organizational base.
The organization of Christianity made it victorious amid the outpouring of
new religious movements, for it was a centrally organized church, whereas the
others were not. Its incipient rational-legal administration fostered abstract
intellectual activity, and its challenge to the old philosophical networks pro-
duced the oppositions that fostered a burst of creativity on both sides of the
divide.
Early Christianity formed around 30 c.e. in Palestine and spread rapidly
in the Jewish diaspora communities of Syria, Asia Minor, and the eastern
Mediterranean over the next two generations. It remained particularistic in its
cosmology and its ethics of salvation. Other branches of the anti-Talmudic
reform movements within Judaism, from which Christianity sprang, pushed
Hebrew monotheism into syncretism with Greek philosophy. The most suc-
cessful figure along this line was Philo of Alexandria (fl. ca. 25–50 c.e.), a
contemporary of Jesus and Saint Paul, who seems to have known nothing of
the Christian movement, and drew only on the Old Testament circulating in
Greek within the diaspora communities. Philo assumed that the Greek philoso-
phers were indebted to the Pentateuch, identified Yahweh with Zeus, and
interpreted the cosmology of Genesis allegorically (CHLG, 1967: 137–157).
Philo pushed a grand syncretism among Platonism, Pythagoreanism, and Stoi-
cism, together with a religious monotheism largely shorn of its particularistic
elements. Philo’s work was extremely popular, although not among Christian
apologists of the first few centuries. It was carried, it appears, by a continuing
movement of proselytizers for a universalistic Judaism: that is to say, a rival
movement to Christianity, which had begun by working the same market, but
which had broken with its Jewish roots entirely at the time of Paul. This Jewish
proselytization continued until after 200, when it was prohibited by the Roman
Empire; the Christian preacher John Chrysostom at Antioch was still warning
against it around 390 (CHLG, 1967: 156).
A three-sided struggle took place in and around Judaism during the first
two centuries c.e. Two of the wings were Christianity as an anti-philosophical
religious movement, and syncretism with Hellenistic philosophy such as Philo
of Alexandria’s. A third wing had a militantly anti-rabbinical tone; this com-
prised many of the Gnostic sects, which went so far as to incorporate Yahweh
as one of the demons or as the evil demiurge responsible for the ensnaring
material world (Jonas, 1963). For a long time Christianity was not very visible
among these sects, at least from an intellectual’s point of view. Celsus (ca. 160
c.e.) did not distinguish Christians from Gnostics (CHLG, 1967: 80).
It is characteristic of the occultist movements of this time that they were
polemical and exclusive; they also proliferated across the landscape like a
120 •^ The Skeleton of Theory