2000 Years of Jesus

By Kenneth L. Woodward
With Anne Underwood

Historians did not record his birth. Nor, for 30 years, did anyone pay him much heed. A Jew from the Galilean hill country with a reputation for teaching and healing, he showed up at the age of 33 in Jerusalem during Passover. In three days, he was arrested, tried and convicted of treason, then executed like the commonest of criminals. His followers said that God raised him from the dead. Except among those who believed in him, the event passed without notice.

Two thousand years later, the centuries themselves are measured from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. At the end of this year, calendars in India and China, like those in Europe, America and the Middle East, will register the dawn of the third millennium. It is a convention, of course: a fiction and function of Western cultural hegemony that allows the birth of Jesus to number the days for Christians and non-Christians alike. For Christians, Jesus is the hinge on which the door of history swings, the point at which eternity intersects with time, the Savior who redeems time by drawing all things to himself. As the second millennium draws to a close, nearly a third of the world's population claims to be his followers.

But by any secular standard, Jesus is also the dominant figure of Western culture. Like the millennium itself, much of what we now think of as Western ideas, inventions and values finds its source or inspiration in the religion that worships God in his name. Art and science, the self and society, politics and economics, marriage and the family, right and wrong, body and soul—all have been touched and often radically transformed by Christian influence. Seldom all at once, of course—and not always for the better. The same Jesus who preached peace was used to justify the Crusades and the Inquisition. The same gospel he proclaimed has underwritten both democracy and the divine right of kings. Often persecuted—even today—Christians have frequently persecuted others, including other Christians. As Pope John Paul II has repeatedly insisted, Christians cannot welcome the third millennium without repenting of their own sins.

This millennial moment invites historical reflection: how has Christianity shaped the way we think about God, about ourselves, about how individuals ought to live and the way that societies are to be organized? As scholars have long realized, there was little in the teachings of Jesus that cannot be found in the Hebrew Scriptures he expounded. From this angle, says theologian Krister Stendahl of Harvard Divinity School, "Christianity became a Judaism for the Gentiles." But the New Testament is primarily Scripture about Jesus—the Risen Christ as Lord. This message was something altogether new. Like a supernova, the initial impact of Christianity on the ancient Greco-Roman world produced shock waves that continued to register long after the Roman Empire disappeared.

A New Conception of God
The first Christians were Jews who preached in the name of Jesus. But Jesus wasn't all that they preached. As Jewish monotheists, they believed in one God—the Father to whom Jesus was obedient unto death. But they also worshiped Jesus as his "only begotten Son" conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit. This experience of God as three-in-one was implicit in the New Testament, but defied efforts to fit into the traditional monotheistic mold. By "asking Greek questions of Hebrew stories," says theologian David Tracy of the University of Chicago Divinity School, the early church fathers developed a doctrine of God that was—and remains—unique among world religions. "All monotheists tend to make God into a transcendent individual standing outside time and outside all relationships," Tracy observes. "Now, as in modern physics, we are coming to see that all of reality is interrelated. The doctrine of the Trinity says that even the divine reality in all its incomprehensible mystery is intrinsically relational." In short, Christianity bequeathed to Western culture a God who revealed himself definitively in the person of Jesus, and who continues to redeem the world by the work of the Holy Spirit. Time itself was transformed: where the Greeks and Romans thought of the universe as fixed and eternal, Christianity—building on the Hebrew prophets—injected into Western consciousness the notion of the future as the work of God himself.

Breaking the Boundaries
To a world ruled by fate and the whims of capricious gods, Christianity brought the promise of everlasting life. At the core of the Christian faith was the assertion that the crucified Jesus was resurrected by God and present in the church as "the body of Christ." The message was clear: by submitting to death, Jesus had destroyed its power, thereby making eternal life available to everyone. This Christian affirmation radically changed the relationship between the living and the dead as Greeks and Romans understood it. For them, only the gods were immortal—that's what made them gods. Philosophers might achieve immortality of the soul, as Plato taught, but the view from the street was that human consciousness survived in the dim and affectless underworld of Hades. "The Resurrection is an enormous answer to the problem of death," says Notre Dame theologian John Dunne. "The idea is that the Christian goes with Christ through death to everlasting life. Death becomes an event, like birth, that is lived through."

Once death lost its power over life, life itself took on new meaning for believers. Sociologist Rodney Stark of the University of Washington sees dramatic evidence of this in the high Christian survival rates during the plagues that repeatedly hit the citizens of the ancient Roman Empire. "The Romans threw people out into the street at the first symptoms of disease, because they knew it was contagious and they were afraid of dying," says Stark. "But the Christians stayed and nursed the sick. You could only do that if you thought, 'So what if I die? I have life eternal'."

Indeed, those who were martyred for the faith were revered as saints and heavenly "friends of God" who could intercede for the faithful below. Their bones became sacred relics, their tombs the sites of pilgrimage. Thus was the Christian cult of the saints born, a reverencing of the dead and their bodies that confounded Rome's elites. "You keep adding many corpses newly dead to the corpse [Christ] of long ago," complained Emperor Julian, a fourth-century persecutor of Christians. "You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchers." Eventually, churches were built over the tombs of saints (the Vatican's Basilica of St. Peter is the most famous example) and cemeteries were turned into cities.

Inversion of Values
As the sign of the new religion, the cross signified much more than Christ's victory over death. It also symbolized an inversion of accepted norms. Suffering was noble rather than merely pathetic when accepted in imitation of the crucified Christ. Forgiveness—even of one's enemies—became the sign of the true Christian. More radically, Jesus taught that in the kingdom of God the last would be first, the first last. "In the New Testament, you find Jesus more among the beggars than the rulers, the sick than the healthy, the women and children than the conquerors, the prostitutes and lepers than the holy people," says Martin Marty, director of the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago.

Christianity also challenged prevailing notions of the virtuous life. Where Aristotle had touted prudence, justice, courage and temperance as the virtues proper to the good life, Jesus emphasized the blessedness of humility, patience and peacemaking in his crowning Sermon on the Mount. Where the Buddha taught compassion as an attitude of the Enlightened, Jesus demanded deeds: "In truth I tell you, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me." In Roman times, Christian compassion was manifest in special concern for widows, orphans, the aged and infirm. When Saint Lawrence, an early Christian martyr and deacon of the nascent church, was ordered by Roman authorities to reveal the church's treasures, he showed them the hungry and the sick. Twenty centuries later, the same attitude can be seen in the work of exceptional contemporary figures (usually women) like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa. "The idea," says Marty, is "the poor are my masters."

Discovering the Individual
If, as Harold Bloom has lately argued, Shakespeare "invented the human," it can be said—with equal hyperbole—that Christianity "discovered" the individual. In the ancient world, individuals were recognized as members of tribes or nations or families, and conducted themselves accordingly. For Jews, this meant—as now—that one's relationship with God depends upon the prior covenant he has made with Israel as his chosen people. But the Gospels are replete with scenes in which Jesus works one on one, healing this woman's sickness, forgiving that man's sins and calling each to personal conversion. He invites Jews and Gentiles alike to enter God's kingdom. "Christianity discovers individuality in the sense that it stresses personal conversion," says Bernard McGinn, professor of historical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. "This is a crucial contribution to Western civilization because it releases the individual from the absolute constraints of family and society."

The sense of self deepened. Prayer became more personal. As Jesus himself taught, God could be addressed as "Abba"—the equivalent of "Dad." But as the possibility of intimacy with God increased, so did the interior sense of personal unworthiness. As a moralist, Jesus had set the bar high: those who even looked on another's wife with sexual desire, he declared, committed "adultery in the heart." With the evolution of the Roman Catholic Church came the practice of personal confession and repentance. And in the Confessions of Saint Augustine (354-430), we have the first great document in the history of what Stendahl has called "the introspective conscience of the West." A towering figure whose shadow stretched across the Middle Ages and touched a tormented Martin Luther, Augustine remains to this day the father of autobiography, the first great psychologist and the author who anticipated—by a millennium and a half—the modern novel's explorations of individual self-consciousness.

Redefining Male and Female
In Roman as in Jewish society, women were regarded as inherently inferior to men. Husbands could divorce their wives but wives could not divorce their husbands. In rabbinic circles, only males were allowed to study the Torah. Jesus challenged these arrangements. Although he called only men to be his apostles, Jesus readily accepted women into his circle of friends and disciples. He also banned divorce, except in cases of adultery.

The early Christians heeded his example. In its initial stages, at least, the church strove to become an egalitarian society: in Christ, wrote Paul, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free man, male or female." Although Paul's household code for Christians (Ephesians 5:22-23) called for wives to be subordinate to their husbands, both were equally subject to God.

Christianity's appeal for women was a major reason that it grew so rapidly in competition with other religions of the Roman Empire. Then, as now, most Christians were women. The new religion offered women not only greater status and influence within the church but also more protection as wives and mothers. For one thing, the church did away with the common practice of marrying girls of 11 or 12 to much older men. The result was a stronger, "more symmetrical marriage," says sociologist Stark. For another, Christianity carried over from Jewish tradition a profound respect for marriage. Eventually, the Catholic Church made marriage a sacrament, declaring the bond between Christian husband and wife insoluble.

In an even more radical challenge to the social mores of the ancient world, the church made room for virgins—both male and female—who consecrated their lives to Christ. In this way, says McGinn, consecrated Christian virgins "broke the bonds by which families controlled the fate of their members"—especially women. Thus, Christianity made it possible for celibate females or malesto claim a complete life and identity apart from marriage and procreation.

The church also protected children from the whims of tyrannical fathers. Under Roman law, fathers could and often did commit infanticide. Female babies were especially vulnerable because they were nothing but an expense. From a study of gravestones at Delphi, Stark says, we know that of 600 upper-class families, "only half a dozen raised more than one daughter." From the beginning, Christians also opposed abortion, defending both mother and child from barbarous procedures that often left women either dead or sterile.

In a less direct way, Christianity also transformed the way that masculinity was defined throughout the ancient world. In place of the dominant image of the male as warrior, Jesus counseled men to be peacemakers—to "turn the other cheek" rather than strike back. "A woman preaching that people must be patient and meek and mild would have sounded just like a woman," argues Michael Novak, who covers religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute—and, he implies, would have been dismissed by men. But to believe, as Christians did, that this was the Son of God speaking meant that Christians could never make war with a clear conscience.

Opposition to War
Nonviolence was easy to espouse as long as Christians had no power. As Yale church historian Jaroslav Pelikan observes, "They never imagined that Caesar might become a Christian"—which he did when Constantine converted in 312—much less that theirs would become the official religion of the Roman Empire. With establishment came the power to wage war and to stamp out heretics. From his imperial throne in Constantinople, Constantine did both as protector of the church. But in the West, as "eternal" Rome fell to invaders from the North, Augustine laid down severe restrictions if the conduct of war between states is to be considered just. Among other principles outlined in his monumental "The City of God," Augustine said that only defensive wars could be justified. They should be brief, a last resort and never for spoils or gain. The means of war should never be excessive but always proportional to its goals. Noncombatants were to be immune from harm, and once the war was over, the aim of the winners was to be peace, not revenge.

While Augustine's just-war principles have never prevented wars from happening—including those waged in Jesus' name—they have, over the centuries, at least prompted some statesmen to try to make warfare less barbarous. We are still a long way from nonviolence. "But before Christ," notes Stark, "conquerors butchered people for the hell of it."

Ironically, once Christianity was identified with the state, many Christians found it more difficult to follow Christ than when they were a persecuted sect. To escape an increasingly worldly and compromised church, many Christian men and women fled to the desert (as some Jewish sects before them had done), where they could live in complete poverty, chastity and obedience. These became the basis of the Rule of Saint Benedict—"one of the most influential documents of Western civilization," according to Pelikan—which established monastic communities as places set apart for those called to fully "participate in the life of Christ."

The effects of monasticism on Western society can hardly be exaggerated. For more than a millennium, the monasteries produced saints who established the diverse forms of Christian mysticism and spirituality that are so much in revival today. The monks were also the church's reformers, calling popes to task for their worldliness and eventually becoming popes themselves. Through the example of the monks, celibacy became required of bishops in the East and, eventually, of all priests in the West.

Monks and Modernity
It was the monks who became Christianity's greatest missionaries, planting the church in England, Ireland and other outposts of no-longer eternal Rome. As the barbarians dismantled the empire, the monks copied and later disseminated the Latin classics, thus preserving much of the old civilization and laying the foundations of the new. They also created music and chants, magnificent liturgies and marvelous illuminated manuscripts. In the so-called Dark Ages—a fiction created by anti-religious philosophes of the French Enlightenment—it was the monks who founded the first European universities in cities like Paris and Bologna. It was a Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas, who crowned the Middle Ages with his towering synthesis of philosophy and theology, the "Summa Theologica." And it was another monk, Martin Luther, who fathered the Protestant Reformation.

One measure of Christian influence on Western culture is the extent to which innovations of the church have survived in secular form. The law is a prime example. "Much of medieval canon law has passed over—often unnoticed—into the laws of the state," says Harold Berman, professor of law emeritus at Harvard law school. "And many of the legal reforms the medieval papacy promoted command respect even seven and eight centuries later." Among them: rational trial procedures, which replaced trial by ordeal; the necessity of consent as the foundation of marriage; the need to show wrongful intent for conviction of crime, and legal protection of the poor against the rich.

The legacy of medieval "Christendom" had its darker side as well. From Christmas Day in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as "Holy Roman Emperor," politics and religion were seldom separate. The results were mixed at best. Had the secular powers not defended Christianity, Europe might well be Muslim today. But the medieval Crusades to rescue the Holy Land from the Turks became excuses for plunder by conscripted thugs. Once church and state were yoked, almost any military action could be justified.

Although the New Testament contains no outline for a Christian society, medieval Christianity was one long effort to establish one. The doctrine the church preached became the doctrine the king enforced. Even Augustine had reluctantly concluded that the secular arm of society could be used to crush heresy. Acting on the premise that error has no rights, the church created the Inquisition, dispatching traveling squads of Franciscans and Dominicans to ferret out heretics. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV allowed suspects to be tortured. The guilty were imprisoned and sometimes put to death. Two centuries later, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella created a separate Inquisition aimed at discovering and expelling converted Jews and Muslims who secretly practiced their own religion. Even old women and children were tortured, and their descendants barred from universities and public office. In subsequent centuries Inquisitors expanded their list of heretics to include suspected Protestants and practitioners of witchcraft. Altogether, the Inquisition remains a monument to religious intolerance and a reminder of what can happen when church and state share total authority.

The Reformation shattered the old Christendom but also unleashed new energies. Protestants translated the Bible into vernacular languages and encouraged lay learning and initiative. From Europe, Christian missionaries dispersed to Asia, Africa and the Americas. In many cases, it was a matter of the cross following the flag—a shameless blessing of imperialism and colonialism. But there are other ways of measuring the missionaries' impact. From the 16th-century Jesuits to the 19th-century Protestants, missionaries developed written languages for many "indigenous" peoples who had none—not to mention grammars and dictionaries. In this way, Protestant and Catholic missionaries "preserved local cultures that otherwise would have been swept away by global forces," says Mark Noll, professor of history at Wheaton College. The missionaries also established countless schools and hospitals, bringing literacy and modern medicine to those that the indigenous elites ignored. "Nelson Mandela," notes Noll, "is a graduate of two missionary schools."

As the world moves toward the third millennium, Christianity seems far removed from the Jesus movement of its birth. And yet, the same gospel is being preached. Christians are still being persecuted: in the 20th century alone, there were many times more martyrs—especially under Hitler and Stalin—than all the victims of the Caesars combined. But the differences from times past are also striking. Post-Christian Europe seems spiritually exhausted. In the United States, secularism is the reigning ideology. However, there is more unity among Christians now than at any time since the Reformation. Despite the Holocaust—or perhaps because of it—"the people to whom Jesus belonged, and the people who belong to Jesus," as Pelikan puts it, are no longer spiritual enemies. Science and religion, once thought to be implacable adversaries, are beginning to talk to each other: the hubris of the Enlightenment has run its course.

Numerically, it is already clear, the future of Christianity lies with the youthful churches of Africa, the Hispanics of the Americas and—who knows?—the millions of stalwart Christians in China. Christianity already comprises the most diverse society known to humankind. But what new ideas and forms the gospel will inspire await the birth of the third millennium. Of the future, the Book of Revelation has only this to say: "Behold, I make all things new."

Charlemagne
Born: April 2, c. 742 Died: Jan. 28, 814, Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, Austrasia.

Also called CHARLES I, byname CHARLES THE GREAT, French CHARLES LE GRAND, Latin CAROLUS MAGNUS, German KARL DER GROSSE, king of the Franks, king of the Lombards, and emperor.

As king of the Franks, Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom in Italy, subdued the Saxons, annexed Bavaria to his kingdom, fought campaigns in Spain and Hungary, and, with the exception of the Kingdom of Asturias in Spain, southern Italy, and the British Isles, united in one superstate practically all the Christian lands of western Europe. In 800 he assumed the title of emperor. (He is reckoned as Charles I of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as Charles I of France.) Besides expanding its political power, he also brought about a cultural renaissance in his empire. Although this imperium survived its founder by only one generation, the medieval kingdoms of France and Germany derived all their constitutional traditions from Charles's monarchy. Throughout medieval Europe, the person of Charles was considered the prototype of a Christian king and emperor. 

Inquisition
In Roman Catholicism, a papal judicial institution that combated heresy and such things as alchemy, witchcraft, and sorcery and wielded considerable power in medieval and early modern times. The name is derived from the Latin verb inquiro ("inquire into"), which emphasizes the fact that the inquisitors did not wait for complaints but sought out heretics and other offenders.

After the Roman Church had consolidated its power in the early Middle Ages, heretics came to be looked upon as enemies of society. With the appearance of large-scale heresies in the 11th and 12th centuries--notably among the Cathari and Waldenses--Pope Gregory IX in 1231 instituted the papal Inquisition for the apprehension and trial of heretics.

The inquisitorial procedure was quite detailed; but, in general terms, it gave a person suspected of heresy time to confess and absolve himself, and, failing this, the accused was haled before the inquisitor and interrogated and tried, with the testimony of witnesses. The use of torture to obtain confessions and the names of other heretics was at first rejected but was authorized in 1252 by Innocent IV. On admission or conviction of guilt, a person could be sentenced publicly to any of a widevariety of penalties, ranging from simple prayer and fasting to confiscation of property and imprisonment, even life imprisonment. Condemned heretics who refused to recant, as well as those who relapsed after condemnation and repentance, were turned over to the secular arm, which alone could impose the death penalty.

The medieval Inquisition functioned only in a limited way in northern Europe; it was most employed in northern Italy and southern France. During the Reconquista in Spain, the Catholic powers used it only occasionally; but, after the Muslims had been driven out, the Catholic monarchs of Aragon and Castile determined to enforce religious and political unity and requested a special institution to combat apostate former Jews and Muslims as well as such heretics as the Alumbrados. Thus in 1478 Pope Sixtus IV authorized the Spanish Inquisition.

The first Spanish inquisitors, operating in Seville, proved so severe that Sixtus IV had to interfere. But the Spanish crown now had in its possession a weapon too precious to give up, and the efforts of the Pope to limit the powers of the Inquisition were without avail. In 1483 he was induced to authorize the naming by the Spanish government of a grand inquisitor for Castile, and during the same year Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia were placed under the power of the Inquisition. The first grand inquisitor was the Dominican Tom s de Torquemada, who has become the symbol of the inquisitor who uses torture and confiscation to terrorize his victims. The number of burnings at the stake during his tenure has been exaggerated, but it was probably about 2,000.

In general, the procedure of the Spanish Inquisition was much like the medieval Inquisition. The auto-da-f‚, the public ceremony at which sentences were pronounced, became an elaborate celebration. Under the inquisitor general and his supreme council were 14 local tribunals in Spain and several in the colonies, including those in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Inquisition was introduced into Sicily in 1517, but efforts to set it up in Naples and Milan failed. The emperor Charles V in 1522 introduced it into the Netherlands, where its efforts to wipe out Protestantism were unsuccessful. The Inquisition in Spain was suppressed by Joseph Bonaparte in 1808, restored by Ferdinand VII in 1814, suppressed in 1820, restored in 1823, and finally suppressed in 1834.

A third variety of the Inquisition was the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542 by Pope Paul III to combat Protestantism. It was governed by a commission of six cardinals, the Congregation of the Inquisition, which was thoroughly independent and much freer from episcopal control than the medieval Inquisition had been. Its establishment has been seen by some as an attempt to counterbalance the severe Spanish Inquisition at a time when a great part of Italy was under Spanish rule. Under Paul III (1534-49) and Julius III (1550-55), the action of the Roman Inquisition was not rigorous, and Julius ruled that, although the tribunal had general authority, its action should be limited especially to Italy. The moderation of these popes was imitated by their successors with the exceptions of Paul IV (1555-59) and Pius V (1566-72). Under Paul IV the Inquisition functioned in such a way that it alienated nearly all parties. Although Pius V (a Dominican and himself formerly grand inquisitor) avoided the worst excesses of Paul IV, he nevertheless declared at the beginning of his reign that questions of faith took precedence over all other business and made it clear that his first care would be to see that heresy, false doctrine, and error were suppressed. He took part in many of the activities of the Inquisition.

After Protestantism had been eliminated as a serious danger to Italian religious unity, the Roman Inquisition became more and more an ordinary organ of papal government concerned with maintaining good order and good customs as well as purity of faith among Catholics. In his reorganization of the Roman Curia in 1908, Pius X dropped the word Inquisition, and the congregation charged with maintaining purity of faith came to be known officially as the Holy Office. In 1965 Pope Paul VI reorganized the congregation along more democratic lines and renamed it the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. 

Resurrection
The rising from the dead of a divine or human being who still retains his own personhood, or individuality, though the body may or may not be changed. The belief in the resurrection of the body is usually associated with Christianity, because of the doctrine of the Resurrection of Christ, but it also is associated with later Judaism, which provided basic ideas that were expanded in Christianity and Islam.

Ancient Middle Eastern religious thought provided a background for belief in the resurrection of a divine being (e.g., the Babylonian vegetation god Tammuz), but belief in personal resurrection of humans was unknown. In Greco-Roman religious thought there was a belief in the immortality of the soul, but not in the resurrection of the body. Symbolic resurrection, or rebirth of the spirit, occurred in the Hellenistic mystery religions, such as the religion of the goddess Isis, but postmortem corporeal resurrection was not recognized.

The expectation of the resurrection of the dead is found inseveral Old Testament works. In the Book of Ezekiel, there is an anticipation that the righteous Israelites will rise from the dead. The Book of Daniel further developed the hope of resurrection with both the righteous and unrighteous Israelites being raised from the dead, after which will occur a judgment, with the righteous participating in an eternal messianic kingdom and the unrighteous being excluded. In some intertestamental literature, such as The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, there is an expectation of a universal resurrection at the advent of the Messiah.

The Resurrection of Christ, a central doctrine of Christianity, is based on the belief that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead on the third day after his Crucifixion and that through his conquering of death all believers will subsequently share in his victory over "sin, death, and the devil." The celebration of this event, called Easter, or the Festival of the Resurrection, is the major feast day of the church. The accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus are found in the four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--and various theological expressions of the early church's universal conviction and consensus that Christ rose from the dead are found throughout the rest of the New Testament, especially in the letters of the Apostle Paul (e.g., 1 Cor. 15).

According to the Gospel accounts, certain woman disciples went to the tomb of Jesus, which was located in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin (the supreme Jewish religious court) and a secret disciple of Jesus. They found the stone sealing the tomb moved and the tomb empty, and they informed Peter and other disciples that the body of Jesus was not there. Later, various disciples saw Jesus in Jerusalem, even entering a room that was locked; he was also seen in Galilee. (Accounts of the locations and occasions of the appearances differ in various Gospels.) Other than such appearances noted in the Gospels, the account of the resurrected Lord's walking the Earth for 40 days and subsequently ascending into heaven is found only in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.

Islam also teaches a doctrine of the resurrection. First, at Doomsday, all men will die and then be raised from the dead. Second, each person will be judged according to the record of his life that is kept in two books, one listing the good deeds, the other the evil deeds. After the Judgment the unbelievers will be placed in hell and the faithful Muslims will go to paradise, a place of happiness and bliss.

Zoroastrianism holds a belief in a final overthrow of Evil, a general resurrection, a Last Judgment, and the restoration of a cleansed world to the righteous. 

Sermon on the Mount
A biblical collection of religious teachings and ethical sayings of Jesus of Nazareth, as found in Matthew, chapters 5-7. The sermon was addressed to disciples and a large crowd of listeners to guide them in a life of discipline based on a new law of love, even to enemies, as opposed to the old law of retribution. In the Sermon on the Mount are found many of the most familiar Christian homilies and sayings, including the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer. 

Chosen People
[With reference to] the Jewish people, as expressed in the idea that they have been chosen by God as his special people. The term implies that the Jewish people have been chosen by God to worship only him and to fulfill the mission of proclaiming his truth among all the nations of the world. This idea is a recurring theme in Jewish liturgy and is expressed in many passages of Scripture, as for example: "For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people of his own possession, out of all the nations that are on the face of the earth" (Deut. 14:2). The term chosen people is a free translation of the biblical terms 'am segullah ("treasure people") and 'am nahallah ("heritage people").

The idea of the chosen people has had a profound and lasting effect on the Jews because it imparted a special significance to their relationship with God. It implied a covenant between God and the people of Israel whereby Israel was to be faithful to God and obey his commandments, and God in turn was to protect and bless his faithful people. Being chosen brought to Israel not more privileges but, rather, special obligations to carry out the will of God: "Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; and walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you" (Jer. 7:23). Being God's chosen people carried with it greater spiritual responsibilities and implied more demanding standards and the necessity to develop a spiritual vigour worthy of those whom God had selected to preserve and transmit his revelation to all the world.

The Old Testament contains two variant traditions as to when God selected Israel to be his chosen people; some passages imply the covenant was made when God led them out of Egypt, whereas others state that God had already chosen Israel at the time of Abraham and the other patriarchs.

Critical analysis of the Old Testament has revealed a long and complex evolution of this doctrine in the history of ancient Israel. The notion evidently originated in the basic concept of Israel's early nationalistic religion that Yahweh was Israel's one and only national God and that in turn Israel was God's people and his alone. But the new concepts of world unity and of God as a universal deity that later arose in Israel during the 8th century BC conflicted with this, since God as the deity of Israel alone was obviously contradictory to the new conception of him as the creator of the universe and the God of all humanity. In the following centuries a slow and gradual harmonization of these two conflicting principles occurred, beginning with the prophet Amos and continuing through the period of the Babylonian Exile until the chosen-people doctrine emerged from the synthesis in its fullest form in the utterances of the prophet Deutero-Isaiah.

The Exilic period gave rise to the belief (as stated by Jeremiah) that it was Yahweh's avowed purpose to eventually restore Israel to national independence and that all other nations were doomed to destruction for not recognizing Yahweh as God. After this had happened (as stated by Ezekiel), a renewed Israel purged of its sins would be restored to its homeland and would exist thereafter as the supreme nation on earth. Near the end of the Babylonian Exile, Deutero-Isaiah brought the doctrine to the climax of its evolution. This prophet emphatically denied the existence of all gods except Yahweh. He asserted that the events of history and the destinies of all nations were shaped toward the fulfillment of God's purpose and that this purpose was to ultimately unite all humanity as one people in their acknowledgment of him as God. Israel was to be God's instrument to accomplish this great revelation and would serve as the messenger and witness of God's reality and law to all the other nations of the earth. The people of Israel would exemplify and teach God's statutes to the rest of humanity and would thus help bring the entire human race to salvation. Israel would be the saviour of humanity and the national embodiment of the messiah, even if this meant suffering for Israel in the performance of its divinely appointed mission. In this way the Jewish people's perilous historical situation was inextricably linked to their sense of religious mission and spiritual destiny, and the concept of the chosen people came to form perhaps the strongest link in the Jewish group identity.

After Deutero-Isaiah the idea of the chosen people underwent little change, all-sufficient as it already was in reconciling Jewish nationalism with belief in a universal deity. The eternal nature of the Jewish people's covenant with God formed the bulwark of the rabbinic community's response to the new religion of Christianity, which claimed that its believers were now the elect of God and constituted the true Israel. Because Jews believed that the Jewish people's covenant with God was for all time, Christianity's challenge was bound to appear obviously invalid to Jews. Similarly, the Jews interpreted their sufferings upon the loss of their homeland and throughout all the peregrinations of the Diaspora as both a consequence and a partial fulfillment of the covenant. They believed their dispersion and persecution to be in part due to their sinfulness and failure to keep God's commands, and they viewed their sufferings as manifestations of his love, for through faithfully enduring God's chastisement they would eventually regain his favour. The Jews interpreted their very persecution as the sign that God had indeed chosen them to carry out his purpose.

Modern Judaism has toned down the historic exaltation of the Jewish people above others in the liturgy but has retained the concept of the chosen people, stressing the prophetic idea of Judaism's world mission. The concept that the Jewish people are a "consecrated brotherhood" destined to be purified by suffering toward the carrying out of some yet-unknown mission remains fundamental to Judaism in the 20th century. It has continued to reinforce Jewish morale, self-discipline, and religious devotion in the face of the Holocaust and other destructive impacts on world Jewry in the modern era. 

Middle Ages
The period in European history from the collapse of Roman civilization in the 5th century AD to the period of the Renaissance (variously interpreted as beginning in the 13th, 14th, or 15th century, depending on the region of Europe and on other factors). The term and its conventional meaning were introduced by Italian humanists with invidious intent; the humanists were engaged in a revival of classical learning and culture, and the notion of a thousand-year period of darkness and ignorance separating them from the ancient Greek and Roman world served to highlight the humanists' own work and ideals. In a sense, the humanists invented the Middle Ages in order to distinguish themselves from it. The Middle Ages nonetheless provided the foundation for the transformations of the humanists' own Renaissance.

The sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in AD 410 had enormous impact on the political structure and social climate of the Western world, for the Roman Empire had provided the basis of social cohesion for most of Europe. Although the Germanic tribes that forcibly migrated into southern and western Europe in the 5th century were ultimately converted to Christianity, they retained many of their customs and ways of life; the changes in forms of social organization they introduced rendered centralized government and cultural unity impossible. Many of the improvements in the quality of life introduced during the Roman Empire, such as a relatively efficient agriculture, extensive road networks, water-supply systems, and shipping routes, decayed substantially, as did artistic and scholarly endeavours. This decline persisted throughout the period of time sometimes called the Dark Ages (also called Late Antiquity, or the Early Middle Ages), from the fall of Rome to about the year 1000, with a brief hiatus during the flowering of the Carolingian court established by Charlemagne. Apart from that interlude, no large kingdom or other political structure arose in Europe to provide stability. The only force capable of providing a basis for social unity was the Roman Catholic church. The Middle Ages therefore present the confusing and often contradictory picture of a society attempting to structure itself politically on a spiritual basis. This attempt came to a definitive end with the rise of artistic, commercial, and other activities anchored firmly in the secular world in the period just preceding the Renaissance.

After the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the idea arose of Europe as one large church-state, called Christendom. Christendom was thought to consist of two distinct groups of functionaries, the sacerdotium, or ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the imperium, or secular leaders. In theory these two groups complemented each other, attending to people's spiritual and temporal needs, respectively. Supreme authority was wielded by the pope in the first of these areas and by the emperor in the second. In practice the two institutions were constantly sparring, disagreeing, or openly warring with each other. The emperors often tried to regulate church activities by claiming the right to appoint church officials and to intervene in doctrinal matters. The church, in turn, not only owned cities and armies but often attempted to regulate affairs of state. During the 12th century a cultural and economic revival took place; many historians trace the origins of the Renaissance to this time. The balance of economic power slowly began to shift from the region of the eastern Mediterranean to western Europe. The Gothic style developed in art and architecture. Towns began to flourish, travel and communication became faster, safer, and easier, and merchant classes began to develop. Agricultural developments were one reason for these developments; during the 12th century the cultivation of beans made a balanced diet available to all social classes for the first time in history. The population therefore rapidly expanded, a factor that eventually led to the breakup of the old feudal structures.

The 13th century was the apex of medieval civilization. The classic formulations of Gothic architecture and sculpture were achieved. Many different kinds of social unitsproliferated, including guilds, associations, civic councils, and monastic chapters, each eager to obtain some measure of autonomy. The crucial legal concept of representation developed, resulting in the political assembly whose members had plena potestas--full power--to make decisions binding upon the communities that had selected them. Intellectual life, dominated by the Roman Catholic church, culminated in the philosophical method of Scholasticism, whose preeminent exponent, St. Thomas Aquinas, achieved in his writings on Aristotle and the Church Fathers one of the greatest syntheses in Western intellectual history.

The breakup of feudal structures, the strengthening of city-states in Italy, and the emergence of national monarchies in Spain, France, and England, as well as such cultural developments as the rise of secular education, culminated in the birth of a self-consciously new age with a new spirit, one that looked all the way back to classical learning for its inspiration and that came to be known as the Renaissance. 

Martin Luther
Born: Nov. 10, 1483, Eisleben, Saxony [Germany]
Died: Feb. 18, 1546, Eisleben

German priest and scholar whose questioning of certain church practices led to the Protestant Reformation . He is one of the pivotal figures of Western civilization, as well as of Christianity. By his actions and writings he precipitated a movement that was to yield not only one of the three major theological units of Christianity (along with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) but was to be a seedbed for social, economic, and political thought.

Luther as Theologian
Luther was no systematizer, like Melanchthon or Calvin, though the dissensions among Lutheran theologians after his death, each appealing to one aspect of his thought, testify to the width, coherence, and delicate balance of Luther's own teaching. The basis of his theology was Holy Scripture; and, though the differences between his own and Augustine's thought are important, Augustine must stand next to the Bible among the influences upon his mind. The doctrines of salvation were of prime importance for him, and here the two great, many-sided complex conceptions of the Word and of faith are important. His often subtle doctrine about civil obedience was not always understood by his later followers, and nontheological factors in German history perpetuated and, to a certain extent, even perverted this misunderstanding. His doctrine of Christian vocation in this world and the importance of human life in the world became part of the generalProtestant and Puritan inheritance. In other matters--in the room allowed for Christian liberty, in his conception of the part played by law in Christian life, and in his insistence on the Real Presence in the Eucharist--his theology differs from the patterns that emerged in the Reformed (Presbyterian) churches, in Puritanism, and in the sects such as the Anabaptists. 

Constantine
Died: September 411, Arelate, Viennensis [now Arles, Fr.] Latin IN FULL FLAVIUS CLAUDIUS CONSTANTINUS, usurping Roman emperor who was recognized as co-ruler by the Western emperor Flavius Honorius in 409.

Proclaimed emperor by his army in Britain in 407, Constantine crossed to the European continent with a force of British troops; by the end of the year he controlled eastern Gaul. An army dispatched by Honorius laid siege to him in Valentia (modern Valence, Fr.) but soon withdrew. Constantine then established himself at Arelate. Joined by Roman legions from Spain, he appointed his son Constans as caesar (junior emperor) and sent him to suppress a revolt led by relatives of Honorius. After the fall (408) of Honorius' general Stilicho, the effective ruler of the Western empire, Constantine threatened to invade Italy. Honorius was forced to recognize him as joint emperor in 409. Two years later Constantine entered Italy, but he was driven back to Arelate and besieged by Honorius' generals. He surrendered and was executed. 

Enlightenment
French SI CLE DE LUMI RES (AGE OF THE ENLIGHTENED), German AUFKLURUNG, a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and man were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and the celebration of reason, the power by which man understands the universe and improves his own condition. The goals of rational man were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

The powers and uses of reason had first been explored by the philosophers of ancient Greece, who discerned in the ordered regularity of nature the workings of an intelligent mind. Rome adopted and preserved much of Greek culture, notably including the ideas of a rational natural order and natural law. Amid the turmoil of empire, however, a new concern arose for personal salvation, and the way was paved for the triumph of the Christian religion. Christian thinkers gradually found uses for their Greco-Roman heritage. The system of thought known as scholasticism, culminating in the work of Thomas Aquinas, resurrected reason as a tool of understanding but subordinated it to spiritual revelation and the revealed truths of Christianity.

The intellectual and political edifice of Christianity, seemingly impregnable in the European Middle Ages, fell in turn to the assaults made on it by humanism, the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation. Humanism bred the experimental science of Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Galileo and the mathematical rigour of Ren‚ Descartes, G.W. Leibniz, and Sir Isaac Newton. The Renaissance rediscovered much of classical culture and revived the notion of man as a creative being, while the Reformation, more directly but in the long run no less effectively, challenged the monolithic authority of the Roman Catholic church. For Luther as for Bacon or Descartes, the way to truth lay in the application of human reason. Received authority, whether of Ptolemy in the sciences or of the church in matters of the spirit, was to be subject to the probings of unfettered minds. The successful application of reason to any question depended on its correct application--on the development of a methodology of reasoning that would serve as its own guarantee of validity. Such a methodology was most spectacularly achieved in the sciences and mathematics, where the logics of induction and deduction made possible the creation of a sweeping new cosmology. The success of Newton, in particular, in capturing in a few mathematical equations the laws that govern the motions of the planets gave great impetus to a growing faith in man's capacity to attain knowledge. At the same time, the idea of the universe as a mechanism governed by a few simple (and discoverable) laws had a subversive effect on the concepts of a personal God and individual salvation that were central to Christianity.

Inevitably, the method of reason was applied to religion itself. The product of a search for a natural--rational--religion was deism, which, although never an organized cult or movement, conflicted with Christianity for two centuries, especially in England and France. For the deist a very few religious truths sufficed, and they were truths felt to be manifest to all rational beings: the existence of one God, often conceived of as architect or mechanician, the existence of a system of rewards and punishments administered by that God, and the obligation of men to virtue and piety. Beyond the natural religion of the deists lay the more radical products of the application of reason to religion: skepticism, atheism, and materialism. The Enlightenment produced the first modern secularized theories of psychology and ethics. John Locke conceivedof the human mind as being at birth a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which experience wrote freely and boldly, creating the individual character according to the individual experience of the world. Supposed innate qualities, such as goodness or original sin, had no reality. In a darker vein, Thomas Hobbes portrayed man as moved solely by considerations of his own pleasure and pain. The notion of man as neither good nor bad but interested principally in survival and the maximization of his own pleasure led to radical political theories. Where the state had once been viewed as an earthly approximation of an eternal order, with the city of man modeled on the city of God, now it came to be seen as a mutually beneficial arrangement among men aimed at protecting the natural rights and self-interest of each.

The idea of society as a social contract, however, contrasted sharply with the realities of actual societies. Thus the Enlightenment became critical, reforming, and eventually revolutionary. Locke and Jeremy Bentham in England, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire in France, and Thomas Jefferson in America all contributed to an evolving critique of the arbitrary, authoritarian state and to sketching the outline of a higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and functioning as a political democracy. Such powerful ideas found expression as reform in England and as revolution in France and America.

The Enlightenment expired as the victim of its own excesses. The more rarefied the religion of the deists became, the less it offered those who sought solace or salvation. The celebration of abstract reason provoked contrary spirits to begin exploring the world of sensation and emotion in the cultural movement known as Romanticism. The Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution severely tested the belief that man could govern himself. The high optimism that marked much of Enlightenment thought, however, survived as one of the movement's most enduring legacies: the belief that human history is a record of general progress. 

Ferdinand II
Born: March 10, 1452, Sos, Aragon
Died: Jan. 23, 1516, Madrigalejo, Spain.

By name FERDINAND THE CATHOLIC, Spanish FERNANDO EL CAT LICO, king of Aragon and king of Castile (as Ferdinand V) from 1479, joint sovereign with Queen Isabella I. (As Spanish ruler of southern Italy, he was also known as Ferdinand III of Naples and Ferdinand II of Sicily.)

He united the Spanish kingdoms into the nation of Spain and began Spain's entry into the modern periodof imperial expansion. Ferdinand was the son of John II of Aragon and Juana Enr¡quez, both of Castilian origin. In 1461, in the midst of a bitterly contested succession, John II named him heir apparent and governor of all his kingdoms and lands. Ferdinand's future was assured when he came of age, in 1466, and when he was named king of Sicily, in 1468, in order to impress the court of Castile, where his father ultimately wished to place him. In addition to participating in court life, the young prince saw battle during the Catalonian wars. In the summer of 1468, beginning to sow his wild oats, he went courting; the first fruits of these adventures were Alfonso of Aragon, future archbishop of Zaragoza and his father's favourite, and Juana of Aragon. John II was careful about Ferdinand's education and took personal charge of it, making sure that Ferdinand learned as much as possible from experience. He also provided him with teachers who taught him humanistic attitudes and wrote him treatises on the art of government. Ferdinand had no apparent bent for formal studies, but he was a patron of the arts and a devotee of vocal and instrumental music.

Ferdinand had an imposing personality but was never very genial. From his father he acquired sagacity, integrity, courage, and a calculated reserve; from his mother, an impulsive emotionality, which he generally repressed. Under the responsibility of kingship he had to conceal his stronger passions and adopt a cold, impenetrable mask. He married the princess Isabella of Castile in Valladolid in October 1469. This was a marriage of political opportunism, not romance. The court of Aragon dreamed of a return to Castile, and Isabella needed help to gain succession to the throne. The marriage initiated a dark and troubled life, in which Ferdinand fought on the Castilian and Aragonese fronts in order to impose his authority over the noble oligarchies, shifting his basis of support from one kingdom to the other according to the intensity of the danger. Despite the political nature of the union, he loved Isabella sincerely. She quickly bore him children: the infanta Isabella was born in 1470; the heir apparent, John, in 1478; and the infantas Juana (called Juana la Loca--Joan the Mad), Catalina (later called--as the first wife of Henry VIII of England--Catherine of Aragon), and Mar¡a followed. The marriage began, however, with almost continual separation. Ferdinand, often away in the Castilian towns or on journeys to Aragon, reproached his wife for the comfort of her life. At the same time, the restlessness of his 20 years drove him into other women's arms, by whom he sired at least two female children, whose birth dates are not recorded.

Between the ages of 20 and 30, Ferdinand performed a series of heroic deeds. These began when Henry IV of Castile died on Dec. 11, 1474, leaving his succession in dispute. Ferdinand rushed from Zaragoza to Segovia, where Isabella had herself proclaimed queen of Castile on December 13. Ferdinand remained there as king consort, an uneasy, marginal figure, until Isabella's war of succession against Afonso V of Portugal gained his acceptance in 1479 as king in every sense of the word. That same year John II died, and Ferdinand succeeded to the Aragonese throne. This initiated a confederation of kingdoms, which was the institutional basis for modern Spain.

The events of this period bring out the young king's character more clearly. In portraits he appears with soft, well-proportioned features, a small, sensual mouth, and pensive eyes. His literary descriptions are more complicated, although they agree in presenting him as good-looking, of medium height, and a good rider, devoted to games and to the hunt. He had a clear, strong voice. He was something of a ladies' man, which caused Isabella jealousy for several years.

From 1475 to 1479 Ferdinand struggled to take a firm seat in Castile with his young wife and to transform the kingdom politically, using new institutional molds partly inspired by those of Aragon. This policy of modernization included a ban against all religions other than Roman Catholicism. The establishment of the Spanish Inquisition (1478) to enforce religious uniformity and the expulsion of the Jews (1492) were both part of a deliberate policy designed to strengthen the church, which would in turn support the crown.

The years 1482-92 were frantic for Ferdinand. In the spring months he directed the campaign against the kingdom of Granada, showing his military talent to good effect, and he conquered the kingdom inch by inch, winning its final capitulation on Jan. 2, 1492. During the months of rest from war, he visited his kingdoms, learning their geography and problems firsthand.

The conquest of Granada made it possible to support Christopher Columbus' voyages of exploration across the Atlantic. It is not known what Ferdinand thought of Columbus or how he judged his plans, nor can it be stated that the first trip was financed from Aragon; the sum of 1,157,000 maravedis came from the funds of the Santa Hermandad ("Holy Brotherhood"). Nevertheless, Ferdinand was present in the development of plans for the enterprise, in the negotiations to obtain the pope's backing for it, and in the organization of the resulting American colonies.

At the age of 50 Ferdinand was an incarnation of royalty, and fortune smiled on him. For various reasons, particularly for his intervention in Italy, Pope Alexander VI gave him the honorary title of "the Catholic" on Dec. 2, 1496. But he also suffered a succession of tragedies: the heir apparent and his eldest daughter both died, and the first symptoms of insanity appeared in his daughter Juana. He was wounded in Barcelona in 1493, but this was unimportant compared with the family injuries he suffered, which culminated in the death of Isabella in 1504, "the best and most excellent wife king ever had."

To secure his position in Castile, Ferdinand married Germaine de Foix, niece of the king of France, on Oct. 19, 1505; this, too, was a political marriage, although he always showed her the highest regard. A stay in Italy (1506-07) demonstrated how badly he was needed by the Spanish kingdoms. Once more in Castile, he managed his European policy so as to obtain a hegemony that would serve his expansionary ends in the Mediterranean and in Africa. In 1512, immediately after the schism in the church in which the kings of Navarre participated, he occupied their kingdom and incorporated it into Castile--one of the most controversial acts of his reign.

In 1513 Ferdinand's health began to decay, although he was still able to direct his international policy and to prepare the succession of his grandson, the future emperor Charles V. In early 1516 he began a trip to Granada; he stopped in Madrigalejo, the little site of the sanctuary of Guadalupe, where he died. The day before his death, he had signed his last will and testament, an excellent picture of the monarch and of the political situation at his death.

Many considered Ferdinand the saviour of his kingdoms, a bringer of unity. Others despised him for having oppressed them. Machiavelli attributed to him the objectionable qualities of the Renaissance prince. The German traveler Thomas Muntzer and the Italian diplomat Francesco Guicciardini, who knew him personally, compared him with Charlemagne. His will indicates that he died with a clear conscience, ordering that his body be moved to Granada and buried next to that of his wife Isabella, so that they might be reunited for eternity. He died convinced that the crown of Spain had not been so powerful for 700 years, "and all, after God, because of my work and my labour."

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