Dividing the world into different religions
It is well known that neither Confucius nor Buddha nor Jesus intended to set up a new religion. If you read John’s gospel you will think he has a lot of harsh words for ‘the Jews’, but the word he uses means the people of the province called Judaea. An up to date translation might be the Israelis.
The most common candidate for a pre-modern deliberate founder of a new religion is Mohammed. However it’s disputed. A lot depends on how you translate early texts. The word ‘islam’ is Arabic for ‘submission’. ‘Muslim’ is Arabic for a person who has submitted. Mohammed and his followers spent a lot of time fighting wars, and usually won. If Mohammed’s soldiers attack you and you lose, what do you do? You submit. Some texts in the Qur’an can be translated either way. Sura 3:52 reports the words of some followers of Jesus. According to one translator they said ‘We are Muslims’. According to a different translator they said ‘We submit’. Because ‘islam’ means submission, either is a legitimate translation. I am not saying the meaning of the text is unclear. It is perfectly clear. Clearly it can be translated either way. We think the two meanings are completely different. When the text was written, the distinction wasn’t being made.
So if they didn’t think in terms of different religions, how did they think? A good illustration is the fourth century Christian historian Eusebius. He knew that Christians, Jews, Greeks and Persians all had their own traditions of worship, and if the concept had been available he might have described them as different religions. He didn’t. He described them as different nations. That’s okay for Jews, Greeks and Persians, But how on earth could he think of Christians as a nation? The way he explained it was that the oldest nation on earth was the Hebrews, with their scriptures foretelling Christ. Other nations derived from them, and everybody except the Christians had abandoned the worship of the Hebrew God at some stage. This was the standard European interpretation throughout the Middle Ages.
The advantage of this theory was that it didn’t create hard and fast divisions between one religion and another: everybody who wasn’t an orthodox Christian was a Christian heretic of some sort or other. The disadvantage was that it meant everybody who wasn’t an orthodox Christian was rebelling against Christ and that provided an excuse to attack them.
So in pre-modern times they didn’t have our hard and fast boundaries between one religion and another. To illustrate the difference I’ll tell you the story of St Josaphat.
In the later Middle Ages Christians loved stories of saints. One of the most popular was the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. Before the invention of printing these stories were passed on by word of mouth so they developed different versions. According to the most popular western version Josaphat was the son of a king somewhere far to the east. Barlaam was a monk who converted Josaphat to Christianity. Josaphat became an ideal Christian king. Later he gave it all up to become a monk. The story includes lots of miracles. There is a reference to it in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
You may know that modern scholars think some medieval saints probably never existed. In the case of St Josaphat I have good news. With the help of newly discovered manuscripts they have traced the development of this story back to a person we know about from other sources, so here is a medieval saint who really did exist. Josaphat is the Latin version of the name. The story was translated from Greek where his name is Ioasaph. It was translated into Greek around the year 1000 from a Georgian version. The Georgian version was translated from Arabic, where the name is a bit different again, Yudasaf. When I tell you the next bit you will know where we are heading. In Arabic the letters for y and b look very similar. Earlier Arabic texts give the name as Budasaf. The Arabic was in turn a translation from Sanskrit, where the name is Bodhisattva. The eastern prince Josaphat, officially canonised as a Christian saint by Pope Gregory VIII, was in fact Buddha. The story of this holy man had spread from country to country, with changes along the way, from people we now call Buddhists to people we now call Hindus, to people we now call Muslims and from there to people we now call Christians. This happened before people had adopted the attitude ‘He’s a Buddhist and I’m a Christian so I can’t recognise him as a holy man’.
Why did we divide the world up into separate religions? Because of the European wars of religion. To establish peace after the wars, John Locke and others defined ‘religion’ as a private set of other-worldly beliefs about God and life after death. After that, Europeans went round the world discovering new peoples, and expected everybody’s beliefs about gods to be equally private, equally other-worldly and equally contentious. The historian Peter Harrison describes this as ‘the projection of Christian disunity onto the world’. Europeans then divided up the world accordingly. In 1787 they invented the word ‘Hinduism’ to describe the religion of India. Previously, Indians didn’t think they had a religion. Indian languages, like most languages, didn’t have a word for ‘religion’. In 1801 Europeans invented the word ‘Buddhism’.
The 19th century anthropologist Max Müller illustrated the problem when describing the Parsis, the followers of Zoroaster. He wrote that the Parsi priests
would have to admit that they cannot understand one word of the sacred writings in which they profess to believe… A Parsi, in fact, hardly knows what his faith is. The Zend-Avesta is to him a sealed book.
In other words, Müller couldn’t cope with a tradition that talked about God without being committed to a set of beliefs based on ancient texts.
In Japan there is a tradition known as Shinto. It is often described as the traditional religion of Japan, and if Japan really must have a traditional religion, this would have to be it. The word dates back to the 8th Century AD and originally meant something like ‘the way of the gods’. It referred to the activities and institutions relating to the gods of the weather. People who engaged with these things might also be followers of Buddha. There was no separation between the two traditions. However in 1868 a new government set out to remove foreign elements from what it considered indigenous Japanese worship. It thereby created a state religion which purported to be the ancient Shinto religion of Japan. Critics pointed out that this wasn’t traditional Shinto at all. 20 years later the Government defended this state-imposed Shinto system by denying that it was a religion. However in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the victorious Allied powers decreed that that would not do. This is what our lot did to the Japanese. They prohibited all state-related Shinto rituals in order
To separate religion from the state, to prevent the misuse of religion for political ends, and to put all religions, faiths and creeds upon exactly the same legal basis, entitled to precisely the same opportunities and protection.
There you have it: Shinto as a modern religion, to be treated the same as other religions, to be given no state support because it is a religion.
That left a problem for European Christians who bought into this system. Is Christianity just one religion among many, or is it the one and only true religion? Some Christians invested a lot of effort into showing how Christianity is superior to all the others. The usual approach is to emphasise beliefs about Jesus, either his resurrection or his status as divine.
But should we busy ourselves drawing dividing lines between Christians and others, or should we be rubbing them out?
As I understand our Christian calling, it is nothing to do with claiming superiority over other people. It is more to do with recognising that other people are children of God just as we are. Jesus Christ had a reputation for welcoming all who came to him, including those who were despised and outcasts. I would like to think that Christians today can do the same.