Syncretism in Christianity

Disentangling competing worldviews & belief systems

One problem I’ve been thinking about over the past few years is the degree of syncretism within Christianity, and how we might address it.

I’m not referring to the well-known and relatively harmless instances of syncretism, such as the incorporation of pagan traditions into Easter and Christmas celebrations.

I’m talking about deeper and older forms of syncretism, which are so deeply embedded in our understanding of the Bible that we have difficulty even recognizing them.

If we are not careful, such forms of syncretism can cause us to misunderstand the Gospel, and make us ineffective in articulating its meaning today.

The challenge is that we often don’t recognize syncretism, because we’re unaware of the origins of ideas and practices that may seem intrinsic to Christianity, but in fact are not.

In this article, I’ll include a number of links to Wikipedia so you can see connections between Christianity and other religions and historical entities.

Preface: Culture & Context Are Inevitable

Before delving into specific examples of syncretism, I should point out the obvious: For Jesus to have anything to do with humanity, specifics were inevitable.

The Incarnation required Jesus to come to a specific time, place, and people, and to speak a specific language to people with particular beliefs and worldviews.

If the Gospel really is for the whole world—all people, in every time and place—we’d expect a degree of universal appeal in Jesus’ message, and we find it.

But we would not expect Jesus to be free from context. The Incarnation requires context.

It does not, however, require the degree of syncretism we find in Christianity throughout its 2000-year history.

Syncretism with Second Temple Judaism

Christianity unquestionably has Jewish roots, and Jesus came specifically to the Jewish people and as a Jewish person, during the Second Temple period.

But Jesus came for the entire world, a point emphasized by the New Testament writers, especially Paul, of whom Jesus said:

he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel (Acts 9:15)

Much of the book of Acts, culminating in the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, is devoted to grappling with the question of the extent to which Christianity should remain intertwined with Judaism.

One key issue was whether converts to Christianity needed to first convert to Judaism.

The answer? No—and so, Christianity emerged as a distinct religion fairly quickly.

But should Christianity even be considered a religion?

Syncretism with Religion In General

It’s easy to overlook the possibility that treating Christianity as religion involves a degree of syncretism.

Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Persian religions of the ancient world shaped the form early Christianity took in countless ways.

This wasn’t a mistake—just as it was essential for Jesus to speak a human language, it was essential to communicate even entirely new concepts in terms of the familiar. Existing religions—primarily Judaism—provided this vocabulary.

But Christian beliefs have a less Jewish pedigree than we might assume. Many concepts that seem distinctly Christian in fact originated in Zoroastrianism:

the unique features of Zoroastrianism, such as monotheism, messianism, belief in free will and judgement after death, conception of heaven, hell, angels, and demons, among other concepts, may have influenced other religious and philosophical systems, including the Abrahamic religions

Absolutely no one today insists that Christians must accept Zoroastrianism in order to have authentic faith in Christ—that would clearly be syncretism.

Can we strip away every vestige of syncretism and whittle Christianity down to a uniquely Christian core of ideas? Frankly, it’s hard to say.

For now, let’s consider the possibility that alternatives exist—that it’s possible to conceive of Christianity as something other than a religion—while recognizing that for its entire existence, Christianity has certainly been regarded as a religion.

But it’s also been bound tightly to ideas other than religion—let’s consider two before turning back to the Old Testament.

Syncretism with Empire

With the conversion of Constantine, Christianity ceased to be a persecuted and marginalized sect, and became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

For more than 1500 years, Christianity would be explicitly tied to numerous empires, including the Byzantine Empire, Holy Roman Empire, British Empire, and others.

Often, the connection between Jesus and empire was tenuous at best—with religion serving as a justification, rather than a source of guidance, for each empire.

Syncretism with Nationalism

In the modern era, Christianity has frequently been incorporated into nationalist worldviews in countries as diverse as Russia, Nazi Germany, the United States, and South Africa.

It goes without saying that such representations of Christianity are deeply misguided, but let’s look back even further for the most perplexing instance of syncretism.

Syncretism with Ancient Israelite Religion: Yahwism

One of the greatest challenges to understanding the Bible and its relevance to Christians today is the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, which describes the pre-exilic period in Israel’s history, but was not fixed in its current canonical form until well into the Second Temple period, after the Babylonian Captivity ended.

Some dates: the Southern Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BC, and the Southern Kingdom of Judah was conquered and its people exiled by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BC. Cyrus the Great’s Achaemenid Empire defeated the Neo-Babylonian Empire and allowed the Jews to return home starting in 538 BC, beginning the Second Temple period in Judaism.

Many events of the Old Testament, then, are represented as taking place before the Babylonian Captivity, but the Old Testament apparently did not enter its current written form until the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, around 400 BC.

This is where it gets messy.

Modern scholarship generally does not accept the Old Testament as reliable history—especially the narratives of the Exodus, the Canaanite Conquest, and the United Monarchy of Israel. The leading contemporary theory is known as Yahwism:

Yahwism underwent several redevelopments and recontextualizations as the notion of divinities aside from or comparable to Yahweh was gradually degraded by new religious currents and ideas. Possibly beginning with the hypothesized United Kingdom of Israel, the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah had a joint religious tradition comprising cultic worship of Yahweh. Later theological changes concerning the evolution of Yahweh's status initially remained largely confined to small groups, only spreading to the population at large during the general political turbulence of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. By the end of the Babylonian captivity, Yahwism began turning away from polytheism (or, by some accounts, Yahweh-centric monolatry) and transitioned towards monotheism, where Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator deity and the only entity worthy of worship. Following the end of the Babylonian captivity and the subsequent establishment of Yehud Medinata in the 4th century BCE, Yahwism coalesced into what is known as Second Temple Judaism, from which the modern ethnic religions of Judaism and Samaritanism, as well as the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam, would later emerge.

Most Christians do not hold this view of the Old Testament or of Israelite history, instead believing in the historical accuracy of the Old Testament and a high degree of continuity from Old to New Testament.

This continuity is, indeed, a frequent theme of the New Testament, especially in the book of Hebrews, and Jesus certainly presented himself as the Son of God—specifically the God of Israel.

But how Israel saw its God—or, if modern scholars are correct, its several gods—seems to have changed dramatically over time, ranging from early polytheism—including the worship of Yahweh, El, Baal, and Asherah—to henotheism, and eventually to post-exilic monotheism.

Equating the God of the New Testament with the God of the Old Testament may seem straightforward, but if ancient Israelites in fact worshipped several gods at various times, we need to consider another paradigm.

Incompatible Practices in Early Israelite Religion

One obvious problem is that worship of these other gods involved practices deeply incompatible with Second Temple Judaism, such as human sacrifice and the worship of Asherah.

If the God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament, how are we to interpret the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac?

Or Jephthah’s apparently condoned sacrifice of his daughter in keeping with an ill-considered vow he made to the Lord?

Such instances of child sacrifice are especially puzzling since this practice is explicitly condemned in Deuteronomy 12:29-31:

“When the Lord your God has cut off before you the nations whom you are about to enter to dispossess them, when you have dispossessed them and live in their land, take care that you are not snared into imitating them, after they have been destroyed before you; do not inquire concerning their gods, saying, ‘How did these nations serve their gods? I also want to do the same.’ You must not do the same for the Lord your God, because every abhorrent thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods. They would even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.

It’s difficult to reconcile these apparently contradictory perspectives into a smooth continuity from the God of Abraham to Jesus. Are we to admire Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac? Are we to admire Jephthah’s reluctant keeping of his vow by offering his daughter as a burnt offering?

It seems far more viable to recognize that the Second Temple Judaism of Jesus’ day had evolved considerably since the period described in the Old Testament, and to regard the Old Testament’s portrait of ancient Israel as considerably “cleaned up” in the service of national unity and legitimacy post-Exile.

How does this view square with Jesus’ own view of the Hebrew scriptures?

Jesus and the Old Testament

While many Christians today might expect Jesus to endorse a view of the Old Testament similar to their own, concepts like inerrancy are modern in origin, and would have been unknown in the ancient world.

Jesus presented himself as the culmination of Jewish history, prophecy, and religion—its fulfillment:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17-18)

The Jerusalem Council seems to have regarded Jesus’ fulfillment of the Law of Moses as complete, allowing for a full break with Judaism—at least for Gentile converts to Christianity.

This brings me to my overarching point:

Presenting Christianity as fully in continuity with the Old Testament is a form of syncretism—and a serious mistake.

Just as it would be a serious mistake to permanently commit ourselves to the syncretism between, say, the medieval Holy Roman Empire and Christianity, it’s a mistake to permanently bind Christianity to ancient Israelite religion—a connection Jesus himself severed by “fulfilling” the Law of Moses, as he put it.

Explaining the work of Christ in terms of the Old Testament—in terms of sin and atonement through blood sacrifice—made perfect sense in the world of Second-Temple Judaism.

It makes little sense today, and is in fact a form of inappropriate syncretism.

This is not to say that we should try to re-imagine Jesus as non-Jewish. It’s not to say we should attempt to disconnect him from the specific time, place, and people to whom He came.

But we would be wise to follow the guidance of the Jerusalem Council, and stop seeing Christianity as a sect within Judaism.

Perhaps we shouldn’t even conceive of Christianity as a religion at all. More on this later.