Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

7

The Ideas of Israel, the Idea of Jesus

In 597 BC, the disaster that had always threatened to engulf Israel finally overwhelmed her. Led by King Nebuchadnezzer, the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem, captured the king and appointed their own governor. According to the second book of Kings, ‘all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and all the smiths’, were removed, with only the poorest people of the land remaining.¹ Worse, the ruler appointed proved so unpopular that uprisings went on and the city was again besieged. When, eventually, the starving city fell a second time, in 586 BC, the Babylonians wreaked terrible havoc, sacking everything, including the Temple. Those who could, escaped, but another batch of captives was taken into exile. ‘From that date on, more Jews would live outside Palestine than within her borders.’²

Just how many people were involved is far from certain. Although the book of Kings refers to 10,000, figures in Jeremiah are more modest, around 4,600 in all, only 832 of them in 586. On the other hand, these figures may refer only to adult males: if they do, we are probably talking about 20,000 overall. Either way, it was a small group, a fact of some importance because it made it easier for the Jews in exile to retain their cohesiveness.

For them, this misfortune was in many ways cataclysmic. As Paula Fredericksen has observed, one conclusion the Jews could have drawn from their predicament, ‘and perhaps the most realistic’, might have been that their God was in fact much less powerful than the gods of their neighbours. Instead, the Jews drew the diametrically opposite conclusion: her misfortune confirmed what the prophets had foretold, that she had strayed too far from her covenant with Yahweh, and was being punished. This implied that a major change in Jewish behaviour was needed, and exile provided just such a breathing space.³

It was in exile that much of Judaism came into being, though present-day Judaisms have evolved as much as, say, Christianity has developed beyond its early days. (The Judaism that we know today didn’t become stabilised until roughly AD 200.) The most important change was that, lacking a territory of their own, or a political or spiritual leader, the Jews were forced to look for a new way to preserve their identity and their unique relation with their God. The answer lay in their writings. There was no Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, as we know it, as the Jews went into exile. Instead, they had a collection of scrolls containing civil law, they had a tradition of the Ten Commandments, they had a book of other religious laws, said to have been compiled by Moses, they had such scrolls as the Book of Wars, and they had the sayings of their prophets and their psalms, which had been sung in the Temple.⁴

In the past, the scribes had not been especially prestigious. Now, as the book became more central to the faith, so the status of the scribes improved. For a time, in fact, they became more important than the priests, as they were financed by wealthy merchants to write down material that would establish traditions and keep the people together. Also, many of their fellow-Israelites looked upon writing as a near-magical activity, possibly of divine origin. As well as writing, of course, the scribes could read. In Mesopotamia, they came across the many writings of Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians and, in time, translated their texts. In this way they came under the influence of other cultures, including other religious beliefs.

But it was not only written traditions that were consolidated in exile. It was now that certain dietary laws were first insisted upon, and circumcision, ‘to distinguish Jews irrevocably from pagans’.⁵ (Other peoples in antiquity, such as the Egyptians, practised circumcision, and the Syrians abstained from eating fish.) Babylonian astronomy was considerably more sophisticated than that of the Jews and so they used this fact to update their liturgical year, devising a cycle of regular festivals: Passover (the Angel of the Lord passing over the Israelites as they crossed the Red Sea into the Promised Land – therefore the founding of the state); Pentecost – the giving of the Laws, the founding of the religion; and the Day of Atonement – anticipation of the Day of Judgement. It was only now that the Sabbath, which had been referred to in Isaiah, took on a new significance (this is inferred because records show that the most popular new name at this time was ‘Shabbetai’). Shabbatum, as was mentioned in an earlier chapter, was originally a Babylonian word and custom, meaning ‘full moon day’, when no work was done.⁶ There is even some evidence that the idea of a ‘Covenant’ with God derives from this time of exile. It is reminiscent of an old idea in Zoroastrianism and, as we shall see, the man who eventually freed the Jews from exile, Cyrus the Great, was a Zoroastrian.

Exile lasted from 586 to 538 BC, not even half a century. Yet its influence on Jewish ideas was profound. According to the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, most of the exiles were moved to the southern half of Mesopotamia, near Babylon itself. They were free to build houses and to run farms, and were free to practise their religion, though no Jewish temple has ever been found in Babylon. Many seem to have been successful traders and, in the commercial cuneiform tablets of the day, there is a growth of Jewish names.⁷

If exile itself was far from onerous, the situation of the Jews improved immeasurably when, in 539 BC, an alliance of Persians and Medes, put together by Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid (greater Persian) empire, conquered the Babylonians. Besides being a Zoroastrian, Cyrus was very tolerant of other religions and had no desire to keep the Jews captive. In 538 they were released (though many refused to go, Babylon remaining a centre of Jewish culture for a millennium and a half).⁸

The Hebrew scriptures tell us that the return of the first batch of captives proved a great deal harder than exile. The descendants of the poorer Israelites, whom the Babylonians had not bothered to remove earlier, were scarcely welcoming and saw no need for the expense of new city walls. A second, larger group of exiles, left Babylon in 520, more than 42,000 we are told in the Bible, and perhaps twice the number that had originally been taken captive. This group had the support of Cyrus’ son, Darius, but even so the rebuilding of Jerusalem did not recommence until 445 BC. This was when Nehemiah arrived. He was a wealthy Jew, highly placed in the Persian court, who had heard about the sorry state of affairs in Jerusalem. He rebuilt the walls and the Temple, and he introduced changes that helped the poor. But, as Robin Lane Fox says, ‘although he appears to have assumed a broad awareness of Moses’ law among the people, nowhere does he allude to written scripture’.⁹

This first and all-important reference is generally agreed to have been made by Ezra, a priest well-connected in Babylon. He too had been an official at the Persian court in Mesopotamia and he arrived in Jerusalem in 398 BC, ‘with a royal letter of support, some splendid gifts for the Temple and a copy of the law of Moses’.¹⁰ It is only now, according to scholars like Lane Fox, that ‘we find for the first time “an appeal to what is written” ’. We conclude from this that an unknown editor had begun to amalgamate all the different scrolls and scriptures into a single narrative and law. Whereas there was an agreed form of Homer in Greece by, roughly speaking, 300 BC, the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament for Christians) was not fully formed in Israel until about 200 BC, when figures such as Ben Sira, the author of Ecclesiasticus and the first Jewish author that we know by name, refers to the ‘book of the covenant of the most high god, the law which Moses commanded’.¹¹ As was mentioned earlier, the idea of a covenant with God, such a central element in Judaism, may have been adapted from Zoroastrian beliefs in Mesopotamia. After exile, the covenant that dominated Jewish life the most was with the book, which in turn meant that great effort was made to ensure there was strict agreement on what went into it and what was left out. The Jews had to establish a canon. So began the first steps toward the compilation of the Bible, arguably the most influential book of all time.

Originally, the word ‘canon’ was Sumerian – it meant ‘reed’, something straight and upright. Both the Akkadians and the Egyptians had canons. It was particularly important in Egypt where the Nile flooded regularly and inundated properties, changing the land and obliterating boundaries. Precise records were therefore invaluable, and this was the primary meaning of the canon. At the same time, the vizier, who was in charge of the archives, was also in charge of the judiciary – and this is how use of the word spread, to mean a traditional, unvariable standard.¹² In Greek, the word kanon also meant a straight rod or ruler, and it too expanded, to mean an abstract standard (a ‘yardstick’, as we would say), and even the rules by which poetry or music should be composed.¹³ Plato’s ideas about ideal form easily lent themselves to the idea of a canon: great works enshrined these traditional rules. In classical Greece, therefore, canon could apply either to single works or entire collections. Polyclitus wrote a canon about the human form. But it was the Jews who first applied the word to scripture. To be included in their canon, writings must have been divinely inspired.

The development of the scriptures had an effect on the Jews which set them apart from, say, the Greeks and, later, the Romans. In Greece, the fifth, fourth and third centuries BC saw the development, as we have seen, of philosophy, critical thinking, tragic drama, history writing, and a trend to less and less religious belief. In Israel it was the opposite: as people learned to read, and to take pleasure in the book, they made more and more of it. Since so much of it was prophecy, rather than mythology, or observation (as in Greece), there was huge scope for interpreting what, exactly, the prophets had meant. Bible commentaries proliferated and with them a general level of confusion as to the real meaning of the scriptures. Many scrolls of scripture were regarded as sacred, especially the early ones that contained the name of God, YHWH. Later texts excluded this name, for fear that gentiles might use it in spells. Not mentioning the name also implied that God could not be defined or limited.¹⁴

Josephus, a Jewish leader born around AD 37, who later became a Roman citizen, wrote two famous histories about the Jews, The Jewish War and The Jewish Antiquities. He identified twenty-two scriptural books, though there were many other non-canonical ones. These twenty-two, he said, ‘are justly accredited and contain the record of all time’. He identified five books of law, thirteen books of history, all written, he said, by prophets, and four ‘books of hymns to God and precepts for human conduct’ (Psalms, Proverbs, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes).¹⁵ Twenty-two may have been chosen because it was the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet – numerology again. Yet, in Jesus’ lifetime, there appears to have been no idea that the canon of scriptures was closed, there was no ‘authorised version’ as we would say. The wording and the length could both vary (there were long and short versions of some books, such as Ezekiel), and there was great disagreement on what their meaning was.¹⁶

What Christians call the Old Testament is for Jews the Tanakh, actually an acronym which derives from the three types of holy writing: Torah (law), Neviim (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings). The five books that make up the Torah were known in early Greek versions of the Bible as the Pentateuch.¹⁷ The division of the scriptures into verses and chapters was not in the minds of the original authors, but were later innovations. Verses were introduced in the ninth century, and chapters in the thirteenth. The order of the books of the Hebrew Bible differs from that of the Christian Old Testament, while the Catholic OT has inter-testamental books and the Protestant OT does not.¹⁸

There is now an immense amount of scholarship relating to the writing of the Old Testament, analysis which has ‘revealed’, among other things, when the scriptures were first set down, by how many authors, and in some cases where they were written. For example, scholars now believe that the Torah was made up of four ‘layers’, compiled towards the end of the fourth century BC (i.e., post-exile). This is deduced because, although the book of Genesis comes first in the Bible’s scheme of things, the earliest books of the prophets, set in the mid- to late eighth century BC, although they describe many experiences of the early Israelites, make no mention whatsoever of the Creation, Adam and Eve or (for Christians) the Fall. Such evidence of writing as has been found, by archaeologists at seven sites in Judah and dating to earlier centuries, is invariably economic material (deliveries of wine or oil), or associated with government or administrative matters. In addition, the Theogony of Hesiod (c. 730–700 BC) contains some ideas that overlap broadly with Genesis. For example, in the Theogony, Pandora is the first woman, created out of man, just as Eve is in the Bible. In the 620s BC, in Athens, the first written law code in Greek was drawn up by Dracon. Did these elements inspire the Torah in Israel? The historicity (or otherwise) of the early parts of the Hebrew scriptures are also called into doubt by the fact that there is no independent corroboration for any of the early figures, such as Moses, although people alive when he is supposed to have lived are well attested. For example, the Exodus, which he led, is variously dated to between 1400 and c. 1280 BC, at which time the names of Babylonian and Egyptian kings are firmly established, as are many of their actions. And many identifiable remains have been found. Yet, the earliest corroboration of a biblical figure is King Ahab, who battled the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in 853 BC.

We can go further. According to archaeologists working in Israel (some of whom are Israelis, some of whom are not), there is no archaeological evidence that any of the patriarchs – Abraham, Noah, Moses or Joshua – ever existed, there was no exile of the Jews in Egypt, no heroic Exodus and no violent conquest of Canaan. For most biblical scholars, the issue now is not whether such figures as Abraham existed, but whether the customs and institutions found in their stories are historical; and not whether the Exodus or Conquest happened as it says in the Bible, but what kind of Exodus and Conquest they were. In addition to all this, there was no covenant between the Jews and God and, most fundamental of all, Yahweh, the God of the Jews, was not to begin with a very different kind of supernatural being, as the Israelites always claimed, but just one of a variety of Middle Eastern deities who, until the seventh century BC at least, had a wife – Judaism was not always a monotheistic religion.¹⁹ In the very latest round of research, scholars have even cast doubt on the existence of David and Solomon and the ‘United Monarchy,’ that golden epoch of Jewish history when, according to the Bible, the twelve tribes lived under a king, beginning in the twelfth century BC, when such vast cities as Megiddo (Armageddon), Hazor and Jezreel were built. On this view, David and Solomon, if they were kings, were small-time rulers, not the great builders of palaces that dominated the region that is now Israel and are made so much of in the Bible.²⁰ In particular, the ‘golden age of Solomon’ is a problem historically.

An even more serious undermining of the Bible’s authority has come, however, from the general realisation, as archaeology has developed, that a world that is supposed to be set in the Bronze Age – say, c. 1800 BC – is in fact set in the Iron Age, i.e., after 1200 BC. Place names in the Bible are Iron Age names, the Philistines (Palestinians) are not mentioned in other, extra-biblical texts, until around 1200 BC, and domesticated camels, though mentioned in the Bible as early as chapter 24 of Genesis, were not brought under human control until the end of the second millennium BC.²¹

Then there is the work of Israel Finkelstein. Professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, he is possibly the most charismatic and controversial archaeologist of his generation. His contribution is twofold. Traditionally – that is, according to the Bible – the Israelites came into the land of Canaan from outside and, aided by their God Yahweh, conquered the Philistines (or Palestinians) in the thirteenth–twelfth century BC, subsequently establishing the glorious empire of David and Solomon in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC. This ‘United Monarchy’ of Samaria in the north and Judea in the south then lasted until the sixth century BC when the Babylonians conquered Israel, and took the Jews into their ‘second exile’, in Mesopotamia as slaves. Yet it now appears that there is virtually no archaeological evidence whatsoever to support such a view. There is no evidence of a short military campaign of conquest by Joshua, and no evidence of any cities in the area being sacked or burned. Indeed, many of the cities said by the Bible to have been conquered by Joshua – for instance, Arud, Ai and Gibeon – are now known not to have existed then. At the same time there is good evidence that life continued unchanged, much as it always had done. Early archaeologists claimed that the sudden appearance of a certain type of pottery – vases with a distinctive collar – and the four-room house, indicated a sudden influx into the region by outsiders – i.e., the Israelites. Subsequent research, however, has shown that these developments took about 150 years to mature, in different places, and in many cases pre-date when the Israelite outsiders were supposed to have arrived. If this view is correct, then of course it means that the Bible is wrong in a very important respect, namely, in seeking to show how different the Jews were from everyone else in the region. On this most recent scenario, the Jews did not arrive from outside Canaan and subdue the indigenous people, as the Bible says, but were just a local tribe, like many others, who gradually separated out, with their own gods (in the plural).²²

The significance of this is that it supports the view that the Bible was first assembled by Jews returning from the ‘second exile’ in Babylon (the ‘first’ being in Egypt), who compiled a narrative which was designed to do two things. In the first place, it purported to show that there was a precedent in ancient history for Jews to arrive from outside and take over the land; and second, in order to justify the claims to the land, the Covenant with God was invented, meaning that the Israelites needed a special God for this to happen, an entity very different from any other deity in the region.²³

And it is in this light that the recent work of Dr Raz Kletter comes in. Dr Kletter, of the Israeli Archaeological Service, has recently completed an examination of no fewer than 850 figurines excavated over the past decades. These figurines, usually small, made of wood or moulded from clay, have exaggerated breasts and are generally meant to be viewed only from the front. Many are broken, perhaps in a ritual, and many are discarded, found in refuse dumps. Others are found in bamot, open sacred places. All date from the eighth to sixth centuries BC. No one knows why these figurines are found where they are found, or take the form that they do. There are also a number of male figures, either heads alone, or whole bodies, seated on horses. According to Dr Kletter, and Ephraim Stern in his magisterial survey, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (volume 2), the figurines represent Yahweh and his consort, Astarte. (The female figure of ‘Wisdom’ is presented as a consort for the biblical God in Proverbs 8.) Professor Stern says that these Israelite figurines and bamot are not so different from those in neighbouring countries and he concludes that they represent an intermediate stage in the development of Judaism, between paganism and monotheism, which he calls ‘pagan Yahwehism’. The significance of these figurines lies in their date and the fact that there is no substantial difference between them and figurines in other countries. They appear to support the idea that full-blown Judaism did not emerge until the Babylonian exile. In short, the Israelites of the ‘second exile’ period converted Yahweh into a special, single God to justify their claims to the land.²⁴

There is of course an opposing argument, which is argued equally robustly. If Tel Aviv University may be said to be the centre of the radical camp in these matters, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is the conservative centre. Amihai Mazar is professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University and author of Archaeology of the Land of the Bible (volume 1). He admits that many of the early books of the Hebrew scriptures, particularly where they concern the patriarchs, cannot be treated as reliable. But beyond that he won’t go. In the first place, he points to the Meneptah stele in Cairo Museum. A stele is a slab of stone bearing inscriptions and Meneptah was an Egyptian pharaoh. This stele is dated to 1204 BC and describes the conquest, by the Egyptians, of several cities in the area that is now Israel, including Ashkelon and Gezer. But the stele also describes the destruction of ‘the people of Israel’. Mazar further cites the discovery of the Tel Dan stele in 1993 which carries an inscription in Aramaic referring to ‘Beit David’, or the House of David, as in ‘David’s dynasty’. Dated to the ninth century BC, Professor Mazar argues that this stele supports the traditional view as given in the Bible.²⁵ And whatever revisions to the biblical chronology, and meaning, are necessary, as William Foxwell Albright has remarked, no one questions the fact that monotheism was a uniquely Israelite creation within the Middle East.

The first part of the Hebrew Tanakh, the five books from Genesis through to the end of Numbers, covers the period from the Creation to the Hebrews’ arrival in the Promised Land. It is held by scholars to have been taken from four sources and put together by a fifth, an editor who tried to impose unity, some time between 520 and 400 BC. The next segment comprises eight books, from Deuteronomy to the second book of Kings. There is an ‘underlying unity’ to these books that make most scholars think that, save for Ruth, they were written by one author, the so-called Deuteronomist, or D. The unifying theme in these books is a focus on the prophets and their concern that Israel would one day be driven from the land, and this makes scholars think that the books must have been written after that calamitous event had already happened: in other words, these books were written in exile in the mid-sixth century BC.²⁶ The third section runs from Chronicles to Ezra and Nehemiah and these books tell of the return from exile and the re-establishment of the Law in the land. This author is generally called the Chronicler and his books were composed and edited about 350 BC. The remainder of the Hebrew Bible was written by several authors at various dates, ranging from around 450 down to the most recent, the book of Daniel, composed c. 160 BC.²⁷

In Chapters Four and Five we saw how several of the biblical narratives are paralleled in earlier Babylonian literature: the child in the bulrushes, for example, or the flood, in which one chosen couple build a boat into which they put a pair of each species of animal. But perhaps the most perplexing thing about the Hebrew scriptures is the fact that they give two contradictory stories about the Creation. In the early chapters of Genesis, God creates the world in six days and rests on the seventh. He separates light from dark, heaven from earth, makes the sun and stars shine, then introduces trees and grass, before birds, sea creatures, and land animals. He creates humans in his own image, and divides them into men and women. They are set to rule over the animals and to eat fruits and herbs: ‘the first creation is vegetarian’.²⁸ Later on in Genesis, however, there is a second account of the Creation. Here God creates man from the dust on the ground (in Hebrew ʾadamah). This creation is specifically male and in this account man exists before other living things, such as vegetation. It is only when God notices that man is alone that he creates animals and brings them to man so they can be named. He creates woman out of one of man’s ribs, and she is called wo-man (‘out of man’).²⁹ The two versions are very different and have always puzzled scholars. In the seventeenth century, as was mentioned in the Prologue, Isaac La Peyrère suggested that the first creation applied to non-Jewish people, and the second to Adam’s particular race. This explained all sorts of anomalies, such as the fact that there were people in the Arctic and the Americas, places not mentioned in the Bible, and which the age of discovery had revealed. It wasn’t until 1711 that a German minister, H. B. Witter, suggested that the truth was more prosaic: the creation accounts in Genesis were written by two separate people, and at different times.³⁰ A similar division exists in the accounts of how the ancient Hebrews arrived in the promised land. One account has the descendants of Abraham going to Egypt and then being led by Moses, via the wilderness, into Canaan. In the other account, the land is settled from the east, with no mention of Egypt. There are several other inconsistencies, but such disparities are a common feature of other religions too.

The inconsistency is (partly) explained by arguing that there are two principal sources for the early books of the bible, what are called E, or Elohist, after the name he used for God, and J, for Yahwist (partly explained because one would have expected a later editor to have ironed out the differences). E is regarded as the earlier source, though the material derived from E is less than from J. At times, J seems to be responding to E. These early sources date mainly from the eighth century BC, though some scholars prefer the tenth. It is the J source that refers to a special relationship between God and the Jews, but there is no mention of a covenant concerning the land. This is why the covenant is thought to be a later invention of the sixth century when, during exile, the Jews became aware of Zoroastrian beliefs in Babylon.³¹ The third author of the Torah is known as P, for ‘Priestly’, who (perhaps; some scholars doubt it) pulled E and J together but also added his own material, mainly the laws for rituals and tithes. P also used Elohim, not Yahweh.³²

In later years, after the exile, responsibility for the accuracy of the Tanakh lay in the hands of masoretes, families of scribal scholars whose job it was to copy faithfully the ancient texts. This is why the canonical scriptures became known as the Masoretic Text. We have some idea of how the scriptures varied in antiquity following the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, where out of 800 scrolls, 200 are biblical books. We know now, for instance, that the form of the Torah used by the Samaritans, a northern tribe, most of whom had not gone into exile, varies from the Masoretic Text in, roughly speaking, 6,000 instances. Of these, the Samaritan text agrees with the Septuagint version in 1,900 instances.³³ An example will show how important – and revealing – editorial control can be. In the Hebrew language, which has consonants but no fully expressed vowels, there was always the possibility of confusion. For the most part, Hebrew words are formed from three-letter roots, which can be built up in different directions, to create families of words that refer to similar things. This makes Hebrew very efficient in some contexts – one word will be enough where three or four would be needed in English or French. But confusion is easy. Consider, for example, the well-known story of David and Goliath. During their famous encounter, Goliath wore armour, including a helmet. Archaeological discoveries have shown that helmets of the period included a protruding strip of metal that would have covered the warrior’s nose and brow. How it is possible, then, that a stone from David’s sling could have hit Goliath’s forehead and disabled him? One plausible answer lies in the fact that the Hebrew for forehead, metzach, could easily have been confused with mitzchah, meaning greaves – leg armour, not unlike cricket pads in principle. Both come from the same root: m-tz-ch. If David had thrown his stone in such a way that it lodged between Goliath’s greaves and his flesh, so that he was unable to bend his knee, he could have been knocked off balance, allowing David to tower above him, and kill him.³⁴

The Neviim, or books of the prophets, are divided into the former prophets, such as Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, which are mainly narrative in construction, and the latter prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which were covered in Chapter 5. Ben Sira, writing around 180 BC, makes mention of ‘twelve prophets’; so this section of the Tanakh must have been settled by then.³⁵ The Ketuvim are comprised mainly of ‘wisdom literature’ and poetical works – Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the book of Job. They are much later works than the other sections and may have joined the canon only because, in the mid-second century BC, when the Jews were being persecuted by Antiochus Epiphanes, a successor of Alexander the Great, he tried to impose Greek ways and to destroy the Hebrews’ scriptures. In response, the Ketuvim were accepted by Jews as part of their canon. In the opening to Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus (a book that became part of the Apocrypha, and not to be confused with Ecclesiastes) he mentions three separate types of writing: the Law, the Prophets and ‘other books’. Since Ecclesiasticus was translated into Greek around 132 BC (by the author’s grandson), we may take it that the canon was more or less formed by then.³⁶ Just how ‘official’ this canon was is open to doubt. The Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, discovered after the Second World War, are a large and very varied group, which in itself suggests that there was a great range of scriptures available, some of them very different from the Masoretic Text. By the time Jesus was alive, though there was ‘a’ canon of writings, there is no reason to suppose that this was ‘exclusive’, and that other revered texts were not in widespread use.³⁷

The Septuagint – the Greek version of the Tanakh – is a case in point. In the third century BC, King Ptolemy Philadelphus, of Alexandria (285–247 BC), had the best library in the world. (Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, and based on Aristotle’s principles for planning the ideal city, was built on a spit of land between the sea and a lake and was as near as practicable to the westernmost mouth of the Nile. A Greek city in Egypt, it became filled with palaces and temples and a great library, which soon made it ‘the intellectual and cultural capital of the world’.³⁸) However, the king was told by his librarian, Demetrius, that he lacked five important books: the Torah. Accordingly, Ptolemy Philadelphus approached Eleazar, high priest in Jerusalem, who made seventy scholars available, to translate the Hebrew books into Greek. Without being aware of it, these seventy scholars each produced identical translations. A more probable chronology is that Hebrew, as a spoken language, began to die out during exile, to be replaced by Aramaic (the language of Jesus) as the spoken tongue. Gradually, Hebrew became a literary language (like medieval Latin) and, among the Hellenised Jews in Alexandria, the need arose for a Greek version of their Bible. The Torah may have been translated into Greek as early as the fifth/fourth century BC. What interests us here, apart from the fantastic nature of the translation legend, is the fact that the Septuagint comprised all the books of the Old Testament that we use (but in a different order), plus the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha.³⁹

The books in the Apocrypha include Ecclesiasticus, Judith, the first and second book of Maccabees, Tobit, and Wisdom. In Jerusalem they were not seen as divinely inspired, though they had a kind of second-rate authority. In Alexandria, they were accepted as part of the canon, though there too they were regarded as less important.⁴⁰ The Pseudepigrapha are so-called because it was the practice of the time to attribute what were in fact anonymous writings to famous figures from the past. For example, the Wisdom of Solomon was written down long after its ‘author’ was dead. The book of Jubilees describes the history of the world from the Creation to the Jews’ wanderings in Sinai and adds such details as the names of Adam’s children, following on from Cain, Abel and Seth. Other books provide extra details about the Exodus.⁴¹ But most of all the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha show how ideas were developing in Judaism in the years before Jesus was born. The idea of Satan emerges, the resurrection of the body is distinguished from the resurrection of the soul, and ideas about rewards and punishments beyond the grave emerge. ‘Sheol’, the underworld where hitherto the dead dwelt, in some discomfort, is now divided into two compartments, a form of heaven for the righteous and what was in effect hell for the unrighteous. These ideas may also have been first encountered when the Israelites were in exile among Zoroastrians in Babylon.⁴²

It is worth noting, once more, how different the Hebrew scriptures were from Greek literature, produced at more or less the same time. In particular, the Tanakh was narrow in outlook. As Robin Lane Fox has observed, there is no detailed concern with politics, or with the great forces – economic, scientific, even geographic – that shape the world. Certain comparisons highlight this difference. For example, the Song of Deborah in the Old Testament is, like Aeschylus’ The Persians, an examination of the impact of defeat in war on the enemy’s royal women. The Hebrew scriptures are a victory ode, they gloat over the changed circumstances of the women with the words: ‘So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord.’ In contrast, Aeschylus’ tragedy shows sympathy for the women: the gods may have fought on the side of Greece but that doesn’t stop their enemies being treated as full human beings in their own right.⁴³

An even bigger gulf existed between the history of Herodotus and Thucydides and the Hebrew scriptures. Herodotus does allow for miracles and Thucydides sees ‘the hand of fate’ behind events; however, whereas the Greeks researched their books, visited actual sites and interrogated eyewitnesses where they could, and whereas they regarded men as responsible for their actions, in both victory and defeat and, in Thucydides’ case certainly, allowed little or no role for the gods, the Hebrew Bible is almost the exact opposite. The writings are anonymous, they show no signs of research – no one has travelled to see anything for themselves, or made any attempt to compare the Hebrew stories with outside, independent authorities. The Hebrew scriptures aim to tell the entire history of the world, since creation, treating distant events in much the same way as more recent happenings. The Genesis narrative (but less so the later books) is full of fantastic dates, never queried, unlike Thucydides, say, who was well aware of local calendars and how they differed from one another. The main point of the Old Testament is the Hebrews’ relation with their God. It is a much more closed, inward-looking narrative. Several authors have made the point that the first time Judaism was used as a specific term was in the second book of Maccabees, written around 120 BC, to contrast the Jewish way of life with that of Hellenism.⁴⁴ What is unquestionably moving about the Tanakh, however, is its focus on ordinary people faced with great questions. ‘The Jews were the first race to find words to express the deepest human emotions, especially the feelings produced by bodily or mental suffering, anxiety, spiritual despair and desolation . . .’⁴⁵ Some of the texts were ‘borrowed’ from earlier writings. Proverbs, for instance, was taken in disguised form from an Egyptian work, The Wisdom of Amenope. But throughout the Hebrew Bible there is the feeling of a small people living in God’s shadow, ‘which means, in effect, living for a large amount of time in ignorance of the divine will. Inevitably perhaps, this means it is about dealing with misfortune, often unforeseen and undeserved misfortune.’⁴⁶ Is any scripture as poignant, tragic and extraordinary as the book of Job? In its concern with evil it is not quite so unique as is sometimes made out. Job appears to have been written between 600 and 200 BC, by which time the problem of evil had been discussed in other Near Eastern literature.⁴⁷ Where Job is special is in two aspects. For a start, there are more than a hundred words in it that occur nowhere else. How the early translators dealt with his predicament has always baffled philologists. But the book’s true originality surely lies in its examination of the idea of the unjust God. At one level the book is about ignorance and suffering. At the outset, Job is ignorant of the wager God has had with Satan: will Job, as his suffering multiplies, abandon his God? Although we, the reader, know about the wager, while Job does not, this does not necessarily mean that we know God’s motives any better. The book is really about ignorance as much as it is about evil: what we know, what we think we know, what – in the end – we can know.⁴⁸ What is the place of faith in a world where God is unjust? Who are we to question God’s motives?

After exile, the changed character of Judaism, as a religion of the book, had two important consequences, each very different from the other. Concentration on a canon made the Israelites a relatively narrow people (though there were exceptions, like Philo and Josephus). This may well have made them inflexible, unwilling to adapt, with momentous – not to say disastrous – consequences. On the other hand, a religion of the book almost by definition promoted literacy and a respect for scholarship that stood them in good stead. A respect for the written word – the law in particular – was also a civilising factor, giving the Jews a pronounced collective sense of purpose. Scholarship surrounding the scriptures led to the introduction of a new entity in Judaism: the synagogue, where the book was taught and studied in detail. Synagogue is at root a Greek word. It means simply a place where people gather together, and this too suggests that it developed during exile. In Babylon, the Jews may well have gathered together in each other’s homes, on the newly instituted Sabbath, to read (to begin with) the relevant parts of the Torah. This practice was certainly in place by the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, though the earliest synagogue we know about was in Alexandria, where the remains have been dated to the time of Ptolemy III (246–221 BC).⁴⁹

The problem for the Jews was that, despite the success of their religion (as they saw it), their central political predicament had changed hardly at all. They were still a small people, uncompromisingly religious, surrounded by greater powers. From the time of Alexander the Great onwards, Palestine and the Middle East were ruled variously by Macedonians, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. Each of these – and this is the crucial factor – was Hellenistic in outlook, and Israel became surrounded by cities, poleis, where, instead of the synagogue and Temple (as was true of Jerusalem), the gymnasium, the theatre, the lyceum, the agora and the odeum were the main cultural institutions. This was the situation in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Tripoli and as a result the towns of Samaria and Judaea were regarded as backwaters. This cultural division succeeded only in driving the more orthodox Jews back on themselves. Many retreated to the desert, in search of a ritual purity which they felt was unobtainable in cities, even Jerusalem. At the same time, however, there were many other Jews, often the better educated ones, who found Hellenistic culture more varied and better balanced than their own. At root, this meant that, for the Jews, Hellenisation, in Paul Johnson’s words, ‘was a destabilising force spiritually and, above all, it was a secularising, a materialistic force’.⁵⁰ This combustible mix ignited in 175 BC, when there was a new Seleucid ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes, referred to earlier (page 212). Prior to this date, there had been some attempts to reform orthodox Judaism. The Hellenism that existed throughout the Middle East promoted trade and, in general, the relaxation of religious differences. The Greeks had a different idea of divinity as compared with the Jews. ‘To the Hellenistic imagination the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful, and descend to earth in order to teach men reason and the laws of harmony.’⁵¹ In line with this, the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians were prepared to amalgamate their gods – for example, Apollo-Helios-Hermes, the sun god.⁵²

For orthodox Jews, however, this was pagan barbarism at its very worst and it was confirmed when Antiochus Epiphanes began a series of measures designed to promote Hellenisation and aid the reformers among the Hebrews in Israel. He dismissed the orthodox high priest, substituting a reformer, he changed the city’s name, to Antiocha, he built a gymnasium near the Temple and took some of the Temple funds to pay for Hellenistic activities, such as athletic games (which, remember, were themselves religious ceremonies of a sort). Finally, in 167 BC, he abolished Mosaic law, replaced it with Greek secular law, at the same time demoting the Temple so that it became merely a place of ecumenical worship. This was a move too far for the Hasidim (= pious). They refused to accept these changes and they opposed Antiochus with a new tactic: religious martyrdom. For a quarter of a century, there was bitter religious conflict which resulted, for the time being, in victory for the Hasidim. Not only did the Jews win back their independence, including their religious independence, but the idea of reform was also discredited. From that time on, ‘The temple was more sacrosanct than ever, fierce adherence to the Torah was reinforced and Judaism turned in on itself and away from the Greek world. The mob now became an important part of the Jerusalem scene, making the city, and Judaea as a whole, extremely difficult to govern by anyone . . . The intellectual freedom that characterised Greece and the Greek world was unknown in Palestine, where a national system of local schools was installed in which all boys – and only boys – were taught the Torah and nothing else. All other forms of knowledge were rejected.’⁵³

Within this post-Antiochus Epiphanes world, and in the years preceding the birth of Jesus Christ, and despite the power of the Hasidim, Judaism continued to develop, and took four main forms. What happened subsequently cannot be understood without some grasp of these four developments.

The Sadducees were priests, sometimes described as the aristocracy of Jewish society, who were more open than most to foreign ideas and influences. They may have derived their name from Zadok, a high priest in Davidic times, though there are alternative explanations. Politically, they favoured peaceful co-operation with whichever occupying power happened to be governing the country. In religious terms they were characterised by a literal interpretation of the Torah. This did not make them as conservative as it might have done, however, because their literal beliefs led them to oppose the extension of the Torah into areas not specified in scriptures. Since they confined their Bible to the Pentateuch, they had no notion of the Messiah, nor any belief in resurrection.⁵⁴

The idea of resurrection seems to have first developed around 160 BC, during the time of religious martyrdom, and as a response to it (the martyrs were surely not dying for ever?). It is first mentioned in the book of Daniel. We saw earlier how the idea of Sheol had evolved during exile, and then into a rudimentary concept of heaven and hell, and how the Jews may have garnered the notion of a covenant with God from Zoroastrian sources picked up in Bablyon. The same may be true of resurrection, which was another Zoroastrian idea. Although Zoroaster had said that all souls would have to cross a bridge at death, to reach eternal bliss, when the unrighteous would fall into the netherworld, he also said that, after ‘limited time’, there was to be bodily resurrection. The world would undergo a great ordeal in which all the metal in the mountains of the world would be melted, so the earth would be covered by a great stream of molten metal. For the righteous, the molten metal would not be a problem – ‘It will be like walking on warm milk’ – but the wicked would perish, the world would be purged of the sinful and, with only the righteous alive, the earth itself would now be paradise.⁵⁵ As many commentators have observed, the Jews’ predicament, of being surrounded by powerful neighbours, was a natural setting for Zoroastrian beliefs, of a great conflagration, in which great evil powers would be destroyed, and the righteous would be resurrected. It was in such a scenario that the idea of a Messiah, who would lead the righteous to victory, also arose, but that came later.

The Pharisees were a diametrically opposite group to the Sadducees. They were a lay movement, very conservative, but extended the Torah to all areas of life, even those not specified in the scriptures. They were obsessed with ritual purity and held a deep belief in the Messiah and in resurrection. For them the synagogue rather than the Temple was the main way they spread their beliefs. ‘They yearned for God to bring about the last days but did nothing to initiate the End themselves.’⁵⁶

The Zealots were the extreme party – indeed, the word has entered the language as the symbol of extremism. Their main aim, unlike the Sadducees, was to ‘purge’ Israel of foreign ‘defilement’ and they were willing to go to war if necessary to achieve their aim. They believed that ‘the people of God’ would triumph.⁵⁷

The Essenes held property in common and ate and lived together. It was in all probability an Essene community that lived at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered after the Second World War.⁵⁸ They were pious, hostile to other Jews, and held elaborate initiation rites. Their most notable idea was that they were living ‘at the edge of time, in the very last days’, and they spent those days preparing for the coming of God, who would relieve them of the world’s bleak political realities and restore the Jews to glory. They believed that there would be a Messiah, who would lead them to Paradise (some even believed in two Messiahs, one priestly, the other military, a return to ancient Mesopotamian ideas). Essene writings were found at Masada, where the sect was destroyed.

The idea of a Messiah (‘the anointed’) is, according to some scholars, implicit in Judaism. It is related to the idea there would come a new age of peace, righteousness and justice, following cataclysmic disorder.⁵⁹ It was also believed that there was a predetermined history of the world, from Creation to Eschaton (‘the end’, in the sense of the end of time, which ‘will bring God’s definitive and ultimate intervention in history’).⁶⁰ The name given to this set of ideas is ‘apocalyptic eschatology’: a period of catastrophe, followed by the revelation of hidden things (which is the meaning of apocalypse), and the ultimate triumph of God. And, to quote Paula Fredericksen again, ‘happy people do not write apocalypses’. The Messiah (mashiah) was an important factor in apocalyptic eschatology. There are some thirty-nine references to such a figure in the Old Testament where, to begin with, the term means king. ‘Jewish tradition gave pride of place to the expectation that a descendant of David would arise in the last days to lead the people of God . . . A human descendant of David would pave the way for a period of bliss for Israel.’⁶¹ At this time, the Israelites would return to the vegetarian diet they had at the Creation.⁶² This Messiah figure was not a supernatural phenomenon at first; in the Psalms of Solomon (Apocrypha), for instance, he is a man like other men – there is no doubt about his humanity.⁶³ The Messiah only became supernatural because the political situation of the Jews deteriorated, became ‘so bleak that only a supernatural act could rescue them’.⁶⁴

By the time of Jesus, the whole world of which Palestine formed a small part had to come to terms with Rome, the greatest occupying power the world had ever known. For a fundamentalist people, such as the Jews, for whom political occupation was the same as religious occupation, the world must have seemed bleaker than ever. In earlier bleak times, as we have seen, there had been an outbreak of prophecy and now, beginning in the second century BC, there was another, though this time, given that Zoroastrian ideas had been incorporated into the Jewish scheme of things, apocalyptic eschatology shaped these beliefs. Only a Messiah with supernatural powers could save the Jews. And it was into this world that Jesus was born. In Greek the term Messiah is translated as Christos, which is how, in time, this became Jesus’ name, rather than his title.⁶⁵ In this way, too, general prophecies about the Messiah came to be applied to Jesus Christ.

Before we come to Jesus, we need to examine one other factor – the role of Herod and the Temple he rebuilt in Jerusalem. By the time Herod became a satellite king of the Romans in 37 BC, Palestine had been under Roman rule for a quarter of a century. The Jews had never stopped squabbling among themselves, as well as resisting foreign rule where they could. Herod had his own contradictory ideas and, as Paul Johnson says, he was a baffling figure, ‘both a Jew and an anti-Jew’.⁶⁶ When he took power, one of his first acts was to execute forty-six members of the Sanhedrin, the Committee of Elders, who had been chiefly responsible for extending Mosaic law into traditional secular areas. Like Antiochus Epiphanes before him, he appointed more sophisticated, less fundamental figures in their stead, at the same time limiting the Sanhedrin to a religious court only.⁶⁷

Herod agreed with many sophisticated people that Palestine was backward and could benefit from closer acquaintance with the Greek way of life. Accordingly he built new towns, new harbours, new theatres. But he headed off the kind of revolt that Antiochus Epiphanes had provoked by a massive rebuilding of the Temple. This began in 22 BC, and took forty-six years to complete, meaning that the great Temple was under construction throughout Jesus’ life. The scale of works was impressive. It took two years just to assemble and train the workforce of ten thousand. A thousand priests were needed to oversee the workforce, because only priests could enter restricted holy areas. The finished Temple was twice the size of what had gone before (about twice as high as what can be seen today on what Jews call the Temple Mount). It was a colourful and exotic place. There was a vast outer courtyard, open to all, where money-changers had their stalls and where they exchanged coins from any currency into the ‘holy shekels’ needed to pay Temple fees. (It was these money-changers to whom Jesus would take such exception.) In this outer section, there were large signs in Latin and Greek which warned non-Jews that they risked death if they went further. Beyond the outer courtyard was a series of smaller ones for special Jewish groups, such as women and lepers. The inner courtyard was open only to male Jews. The Temple was always crowded and busy. In addition to the thousands of priests who worked there, large numbers of scribes and Levites helped in the ceremonies, either as musicians, engineers or cleaners.⁶⁸ Only the high priest could enter the central compartment, the Holy of Holies, and even then only on the Day of Atonement every year.⁶⁹

By tradition two lambs were sacrificed at dawn and dusk each day, but every pilgrim could offer their own individual sacrifices. This practice was accompanied by singing and music and wine drinking, and needed, we are told, an average of thirteen priests per sacrifice. One description of the Temple refers to seven hundred priests performing sacrifices, which means that more than fifty animals were killed at that one time. No wonder that their squeals, added to the music and chanting, struck many people as barbaric.⁷⁰

The Temple was an impressive site. But under Herod the Jews were no happier in their skin, Palestine was still a client state, and orthodox Judaism still as uncompromising as ever. In AD 66, seventy years after Herod’s death, the Jews revolted again, and this time were put down with such vehemence that his magnificent Temple was completely destroyed and the Jews were sent away from Palestine for two thousand years. Between Herod’s death and the destruction of his Temple, there occurred one of the most decisive, yet mysterious, events in world history: the advent of Jesus.

Did Jesus exist? Was he a person or an idea? Can we ever know? If he didn’t exist, why did the faith he founded catch on so quickly? These are questions which have provoked scholars since the Enlightenment when ‘The Quest for the Historical Jesus’ became a major academic preoccupation. It has to be said that, today, the scepticism, where it once existed, is declining: few biblical scholars now doubt that Jesus was a historical figure. At the same time, there is no escaping the fact that the gospels are inconsistent and contradictory, or that Paul’s writings – letters mainly – predate the gospels and yet make no mention of many of the more striking episodes that make up Jesus’ life. For example, Paul never refers to the virgin birth, never calls Jesus ‘of Nazareth’, does not refer to his trial, nor does he specify that the crucifixion took place in Jerusalem (though he implies it occurred in Judaea, in 1 Thessalonians 2:14/15). He never uses the title ‘Son of Man’ and mentions no miracles Jesus is supposed to have performed. So there is, at the least, widespread scepticism about the details of Jesus’ life.⁷¹

Scepticism also arises from the fact that the idea of Jesus was not entirely new. For example, there were at that time at least four gods – Attis, Tammuz, Adonis and Osiris – who were widely revered in the Middle East ‘as victims of an untimely death’.⁷² These were vegetation gods, not saviour figures explicitly, but they needed to be revived for the sake of the community: there was an overlap in meaning.⁷³ Nor should we forget that, in Hebrew, the very name of Jesus (Ieshouah) means salvation. Allied to the word Christos – ‘Messiah’, as was mentioned above, meaning king and redeemer – Jesus Christ, on this analysis, is less a historical personage than a ritual title.

The early Christian literature, and its relation to the development of Christian ideas, is uncertain. In all the shortcomings of the New Testament, discussed below, we should remember that the earliest gospels were written some forty years after Jesus’ death and therefore they stand in much greater proximity to the events they purport to record than all but one of the books of the Hebrew Bible (the exception is Nehemiah).⁷⁴ Altogether, there are in existence about eighty-five fragments of New Testament passages which are datable to before AD 300. The four gospels that we use were all in existence by, roughly speaking, AD 100, but we know of at least ten others. These include a Gospel of Thomas, of Peter, of the Hebrews, and of Truth.⁷⁵ The Gospel of Peter, for example, like our gospels, details the Passion, Burial and Resurrection, making much more of the latter event. It also relates the Passion to Hebrew scriptures much more deliberately than do our gospels. The Gospel of Thomas has been dated to mid-second century and is a collection of sayings by Jesus, openly anti-women and turning some of the sayings of Jesus on their head.⁷⁶ And, as Robin Lane Fox reports, four fragments of a gospel ‘of unknown identity’ were discovered in 1935 from a papyrus found in Egypt; it contains many of the stories found in our gospels, but in a different order.

The preface of the third gospel (Luke) refers to ‘many’ previous attempts at writing a narrative about Jesus, but apart from Mark and Matthew none of these has survived. The same is true of at least some of Paul’s letters. Paul wrote the earliest of his letters (to the Galatians, c. 48/50 AD), very soon after Jesus died, so if Paul made no mention of the more striking episodes, can they ever have happened? If they did not, where does the tradition come from? The first mention we have of Matthew’s gospel comes in a series of letters written by Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, around 110, though Matthew isn’t mentioned by name. The first evidence of John’s gospel comes from a scrap of papyrus, datable by its handwriting to around 125 and there is a reference to a gospel by Mark a little later, c. 125–140.⁷⁷ The earliest gospel source is generally taken to be Mark, c. AD 75. This is mentioned in a quotation by Papias, bishop of Hierapolis (inland from the Ionian coast, in Asia Minor, Turkey, near the river Maeander). Writing around 120–138 he quoted John the Elder, a disciple of the Lord, who said that Mark was the interpreter of Peter ‘and wrote down carefully what he remembered of what had been said or done by the Lord, but not in the right order’. However, the language of Mark (which, like all the gospels, was written in Greek) was in a style inferior to that used by educated writers. The chances are therefore that he was not a sophisticated man, may not have been directly linked with the apostles and, worse, may have been credulous and unreliable. Given that there is a gap of between fifty and eighty years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the later gospels, their accuracy must be called into question. Of the gospels, only one, John, refers to an author: ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’.⁷⁸

The early Christians seem to have had contradictory ideas about the gospels. Around 140 Marcion, a noted heretic, who believed that the God of the New Testament was superior to the God of the Old Testament, thought that one gospel – Luke – was enough. By the 170s, however, our four gospels began to emerge as somehow special, for this was when Tatian, a pupil of Justin, the Roman Christian writer, brought them together, ‘harmonised’ as a special book. The four gospels we use were originally written in Greek but we know early translations in Latin, Syriac and Egyptian. Some of the translations are as early as 200 and resulted in many variations. Around 383, Jerome produced a major revision of the Latin versions using, it is said, earlier Greek texts to correct errors that had crept in. Jerome’s Bible became the basis for the Vulgate, the standard Latin version, replacing earlier partial translations, called the Itala.⁷⁹ But the actual list of New Testament books that we use was not settled until the fourth century, when the early Christian bishops approved that grouping.⁸⁰

The most significant difference in the gospels is that between John and the other three. Matthew, Mark and Luke are known as the ‘synoptic’ gospels because they are essentially narratives of Jesus’ story, and these stories, it is often said, are like photographs taken of the same subject from different angles. (Luke may have been deliberately ‘tweaking’ Matthew and Mark, to bring out different aspects of Jesus.) In the synoptic gospels Jesus hardly ever refers to himself, still less to his mission from God.⁸¹ But in John Jesus’ life story is less significant than his meaning, as an emissary from the Father.⁸² Even Jesus’ manner of speaking is different in the fourth gospel, for he constantly affirms that he is indeed the ‘Son of God’. It may well be that John is a later work, and one specifically designed to be a reflection on the events reported in the other three. But if so, why does it not even attempt to clear up some of the glaring inconsistencies? The very proximity of the gospels to the events they report only makes these inconsistencies more troubling.

They begin with Jesus’ birth. For a start, neither Mark nor John even mentions the Nativity, despite its sensational nature. Matthew locates Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem but says it took place in the later years of King Herod’s reign, while Luke connects the Annunciation with King Herod’s reign and associates the Nativity, in Bethlehem, with a specific event: ‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.’ This tax was first imposed during the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria, which was the year we understand as 6 AD, after Herod had died. According to this, then, Matthew and Luke have the birth of Jesus ten years apart.⁸³

Details surrounding the virgin birth are even less satisfactory. The uncomfortable truth is that, despite its singular nature, there is no mention of it in either Mark or John, or in any of Paul’s letters. Even in Matthew and Luke, according to Geza Vermes, the Oxford biblical scholar, it is treated ‘merely as a preface to the main story, and as neither of these two, nor the rest of the New Testament, ever allude to it again, it may be safely assumed that it is a secondary accretion.’⁸⁴ In any case, the word ‘virgin’ was used ‘elastically’ in both Greek and Hebrew. In one sense it was used for people in their first marriage. Greek and Latin inscriptions found in the catacombs in Rome show that the word ‘virgin’ could be applied to either a wife or husband after years of marriage. Thus ‘a virgin husband’ almost certainly meant a married man who had not been married before. Another meaning of the term was applied to women who could not conceive – i.e., had not menstruated. ‘This form of virginity ended with menstruation.’⁸⁵ Even in those gospels where the virgin birth is mentioned, the inconsistencies multiply. In Matthew the angel visits Joseph to announce the birth, but not Mary. In Luke he visits Mary and not Joseph. In Luke Christ’s divinity is announced to the shepherds, in Matthew by the appearance of a star in the east. In Luke it is the shepherds who make the first adoration, whereas in Matthew it is the Magi. Then there is the episode, mentioned in Matthew, where King Herod, worried about the birth of a ‘new king’, commands that all infants under two and living in Bethlehem should be killed. If such mass infanticide ever took place, it would surely have been mentioned in Josephus, who so carefully recorded Herod’s other brutalities. But he does not.⁸⁶

The wondrous virginity of Jesus’ birth also interferes with his genealogy. Jewish messianic tradition, as we have seen, deemed that Jesus should be descended from David, which rules out Mary as the vehicle because she, we are told, came from the tribe of Levi, not of Judah, as did David.⁸⁷ But, according to the gospels, Jesus is not born of Joseph at all, but of the Holy Ghost. Therefore, there is no link to David.⁸⁸ On the other hand, according to a very early version of the New Testament (the Sinaitic palimpsest, dated to 200), ‘Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph to whom was espoused Mary the virgin, begat Jesus, who is called the Christ.’⁸⁹ On this reading, can Jesus be regarded as divine at all? In the same way, in Luke, the twelve-year-old Jesus amazes the learned men in the Temple with his understanding. But when his worried parents come to find him, he rebukes them: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in my father’s house?’ The gospel continues: ‘They understood not the saying which he spake unto them.’ In other words, they appear unaware of his divine mission. How can that be when Mary has experienced such a miraculous birth? These inconsistencies, and the silence of other New Testament books on the subject, have led many scholars to agree with Vermes, that this is a later addition. But how can such an idea have arisen? There is nothing in Jewish tradition to suggest it. In the Hebrew Bible several of the wives of the patriarchs were sterile women whose wombs, ‘closed by God’, were later ‘opened’. This was divine intervention, ‘but it never resulted in divine impregnation’.⁹⁰ One possibility is the prophecy of Isaiah (7:14), discussed in Chapter 5, which reads: ‘The Lord himself shall give you a sign; a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’ (a name which means ‘God be with us’). But Isaiah is not suggesting anything supernatural here: the Hebrew word he used, almah, means ‘young woman’, who may or may not be a virgin. When this was translated into Greek, however, in the Septuagint, the word used, παρθένος (parthenos), does mean ‘virgin’, and the passage read: ‘the virgin shall be with child and thou [the husband] shall call his name Immanuel’.⁹¹

In strong contrast with Jewish tradition, the pagan world contained many stories where important figures were virgin-born. In Asia Minor, Nana, the mother of Attis, was a virgin who conceived ‘by putting a ripe almond or pomegranate in her bosom’. Then there is Hera who went far away ‘from Zeus and men’ to conceive and bear Typhon.⁹² Similar legends existed in China but the closest parallel was the Mexican deity, Quetzalcoatl, who was born of a ‘pure virgin’ and was called ‘the Queen of Heaven’. In her case too, an ambassador from heaven announced to her that it was the will of god she could conceive a son ‘without connection with men’. The anthropologist J. G. Frazer believed these stories were very primitive, deriving their force from a time when early man had yet to understand the male role in conception.⁹³ The writings of Philo of Alexandria (born about 20 BC, and therefore both contemporaneous with Jesus and earlier than the gospels) shows that ideas of virgin birth were common in the pagan world around the time that Christ lived.⁹⁴ And of course, Christmas itself eventually settled on the day that many pagan religions celebrated the birth of the sun god, because this was the winter solstice, when the days began to lengthen. Here, again, is J. G. Frazer: ‘The pagans in Syria and Egypt represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on the winter solstice was exhibited to worshippers, who were told: “Behold the virgin has brought forth”.’⁹⁵

The fact that Jesus was a Galilean also takes us into difficult territory. For Galilee was both socially and politically different from Judaea. It was primarily a rural area, settled by peasants but it was rich from the export of olive oil. The larger cities were Hellenised and it had become Jewish only fairly recently. In the eighth century BC, for example, Isaiah had referred to ‘The district (gelil) of the Gentiles’.⁹⁶ Galilee was also home to what we would today call terrorists – Ezekias, executed in about 47 BC, and his son Judas who, with Zadok, a Pharisee, founded the Zealots, a politico-religious party, who advocated paying no taxes and recognised no foreign masters. It was descendants of Judas who led the revolt at Masada, a fortress on top of a 1,300-foot high rock on the edge of the Judaean desert, where 960 ‘insurgents and refugees’ were killed or committed mass suicide rather than surrender.⁹⁷ Galileans had a pronounced rural accent (the Bible comments on this) and so Jesus may have been seen as a revolutionary, whether he was or not. We must also remember that the Aramaic word for carpenter or craftsman (naggar) also stands for ‘scholar’ or ‘learned man’. This might well account for the respect Jesus was held in from the start (and for the fact that he appears never to have had a job).⁹⁸ On this account, was he seen as the eloquent mouthpiece for a Galilean revolutionary party?⁹⁹

Contradiction and inconsistency also surround Jesus’ trial and Crucifixion, which throws yet more doubt on his identity and the nature of his beliefs. Christopher Rowland puts the issue plainly: Jesus was crucified by the Romans – why and what for? Specifically, why was he not punished by the Jews? Was his crime political, rather than religious, or political and religious (in the Palestine of the day it was often hard to distinguish the two). Jesus repeatedly espoused nonviolent methods, which mean he could in no way be identified with the Zealots; on the other hand, his continual advocacy, that the kingdom of God was ‘at hand’, could easily have been seen as a political statement.

The first inconsistency concerns Jesus’ reception in Jerusalem. We are told that he was received ‘triumphantly’ by ‘the multitude’ and that the priests, who led this multitude, were unanimous in their reception. Within days, however, he is on trial, with the priests clamouring for his death. All four gospels agree that Jesus was first examined by the Jewish religious establishment before being handed over to Pilate, governor of Judaea. The first meeting takes place at the house of the high priest, Caiaphas, in the evening.¹⁰⁰ With all the other scribes and elders gathered, Caiaphas asks Jesus if he really does claim to be the Messiah and ‘Jesus replies with words that the high priest deems to be blasphemous’.¹⁰¹ What can this reply have been? Under Jewish law blasphemy was a capital crime but it was not blasphemous to claim to be the Messiah – Simon bar Cochba claimed to be the Messiah a hundred years after Jesus’ death and was even accepted as such by certain prominent Jews.¹⁰² The inconsistencies don’t end there. After the meeting with Caiaphas, Jesus was passed on to Pilate. Yet Jewish law prevented a capital prosecution and execution at the time of the Sabbath, or festivals, as this was, and other laws prevented trials and executions on the same day, or at night. Finally, the penalty for blasphemy was stoning to death, not crucifixion.

The point is that none of this makes any sense at all, in the context of the times, if Jesus’ crime(s) was or were essentially religious.¹⁰³ But if his crimes were political, why is Pilate reported to have said, ‘I find no fault in this man.’? Other sources confirm that Pilate was ‘constantly on the alert against invasion or uprising’. The Jews actually go so far, before Pilate, of accusing Jesus of fomenting revolution. ‘We found this man perverting our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar and saying that he himself is Christ the king.’ Yet none of Jesus’ followers were arrested with him, which would surely have happened had he been at the head of a political group, and Pilate hands him back to the Jews, to carry out what is a Roman execution. In some of the gospels there is no formal judgement by Pilate, and no formal sentence – he just lets the Jews have their way.¹⁰⁴ Nor is the Crucifixion any clearer in its meaning. There is for example no known case of a Roman governor releasing a prisoner (such as Barabbas) on demand.¹⁰⁵ And in fact this episode may be both more and less than it seems. Barabbas actually means ‘son of the father’ (Bar Abba) and we now know that in some early copies of Matthew, Barabbas’ name is given as Jesus Barabbas.¹⁰⁶ Finally, at the Crucifixion itself, we are told that the sun darkened and the earth shook. Is this supposed to be a real or a metaphorical event? There is no independent corroboration of this: Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23–79) devoted an entire chapter of his Natural History to eclipses and makes no mention of anything that would fit with the Crucifixion.¹⁰⁷

The inconsistencies of the resurrection are even more glaring, though in the first place we should remind ourselves that we have no eyewitnesses for these events. This is true despite the fact that the earliest mention of who was present at this remarkable set of episodes is given by Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, written in the mid-50s, before the gospels. Regarding the discovery of the empty tomb, Matthew says the women came to look at it, whereas in Mark they had looked at it before and now returned with spices to embalm the body. John is different again: the body had been embalmed by Nicodemus. In three of the gospels the stone was already rolled back, but in Matthew an angel rolled it back in the presence of the women.¹⁰⁸ In Matthew the risen Jesus appears to the disciples in Galilee, whereas in Luke the episode takes place in Jerusalem.

In his first epistle to the Corinthians, composed in the mid-50s, well before the written gospels, though not necessarily before a gospel tradition was circulating orally, Paul gives a list of witnesses to the resurrection and the important observation to be made is that Paul, although he expected to live to see the last days, fails to mention the empty tomb.¹⁰⁹ Possibly more important, the language he uses to describe the appearance of the resurrected Christ to the disciples, ophthe, is the same as he used to describe his own vision on the road to Damascus. In other words, it appears that for Paul the resurrection was not a physical thing, ‘not the return to life of dead flesh and blood’, but rather a spiritual transformation, a different form of understanding.¹¹⁰

There are arguments against this interpretation. For example, all the witnesses to the empty tomb were women and although there were wealthy women in Judaea, and despite the fact that women are heroines in contemporary literature, in general they had such a low status at that time that if someone were going to invent evidence they would surely not have chosen women. In the same vein, all the conversations which the risen Jesus has with those he meets are unremarkable, ordinary, no different from those he had before the Crucifixion. Again, had people invented these encounters then, given the singular nature of the phenomenon, the meetings would surely have been embellished to make them more significant.¹¹¹

It is perfectly possible that Jesus was both a religious and a political threat – the two were by no means incompatible. If Jesus did call himself the Messiah, or even if he allowed his followers to look upon him in that way, he was automatically a political threat because of the Jewish conception of the Messiah as military hero who would lead the Jews to revolt against Rome. He was a religious threat because the Sadducees would be undone by someone whose conception of Judaism was so at odds with theirs. But this still does not explain the inconsistencies.

The very latest Jesus scholarship runs as follows: despite the differences discussed above, the striking similarities that remain in Matthew, Mark and Luke stem from the fact that Matthew and Luke each had a copy of Mark when they were composing their gospels. More, if you take out Mark from Matthew and Luke, you still have a lot of similar material, ‘including vast sections that are nearly word-for-word’.¹¹² Nineteenth-century German scholars called this Q, for Quelle, or ‘source’. Together with the find, in 1945, at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, of the Gospel of Thomas, which scholars knew about but thought had vanished, this put a fresh light on the New Testament. The two most eye-catching and controversial views that have emerged from these discoveries are, first, Burton Mack’s, that Jesus was ‘a historical footnote’, ‘a marginal personality who, through whatever series of accidents, was turned into a god’, and Paula Fredericksen’s, that ‘Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist who expected a cataclysmic intervention of God into history . . . and was devastatingly wrong. Christianity, then, amounts to a series of attempts to deal with this staggering error, most notably the doctrine of the Second Coming.’¹¹³ Both of these give Jesus a much-reduced status but still consider him to have been a historical figure.¹¹⁴

Whatever Christianity means today, and we shall be following the ways in which its message changed in later chapters, the main idea of Jesus, as reflected in the New Testament, is relatively simple. It was that ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’. The actual phrase itself was not common in Hebrew scriptures but, as we have seen, the idea of a Messiah had grown more popular among the Israelites and, in the hundred or so years before Jesus’ birth, had changed its meaning, from ‘king’ to ‘redeemer’. It is important to add, however, that Jesus never once called himself the Messiah.¹¹⁵

Johannes Weiss, the German New Testament scholar, argued in Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, published in English in 1971, that this dominant idea of Jesus could be broken down into four elements: that the messianic time was imminent; that, once God had established the kingdom, judgement and rule would be transferred to Jesus; that initially Jesus hoped he would live to see the kingdom established, but subsequently he realised his death would be required. Even then, however, he believed that the kingdom would be established in the lifetime of the generation that had rejected him, when he would return ‘upon the clouds of heaven’ and the land of Palestine would form the centre of the new kingdom. In other words, Jesus was not speaking just about spiritual renewal, but he envisaged fundamental change in the physical reality of the world, and he expected it soon.¹¹⁶ Around the edges of this dominant idea, Jesus often took a more relaxed approach to the details of Jewish law (observance of the Sabbath, dietary restrictions), emphasising God’s mercy rather than his punitive justice, and insisting on inner conviction rather than outward observance of ritual. His message was, after all, directed at Jews. He never envisaged a new religious system: ‘I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to them alone.’¹¹⁷ He even turned away Gentiles who sought him out.¹¹⁸ This is a simple but all-important idea that has got lost in history.

After Jesus’ resurrection, and his ascension into heaven, his followers continued to worship in the Temple, expecting his return at any moment and with it their own redemption. To this end, they tried to prepare Israel, urging on their fellow Jews the changes Jesus had proposed. But this, of course, conflicted with the authority of the traditional priests and scribes and, the further they spread from Jerusalem, the more this resistance deepened, among Jews who had no direct, first-hand experience of Jesus. In turn, this caused a major shift in Christianity (a term first coined among the Jewish-Christian community at Antioch): Gentiles were less resistant to the message of the apostles, because their traditional beliefs were less threatened. So that by the end of the first century, the early churches (rather than synagogues) had taken on a greater distance from Judaism than had been the case in the immediate aftermath of the Crucifixion. They repudiated the Torah, viewed the destruction of the Temple, by the Romans in 66, with some satisfaction and transferred the New Testament promises, originally aimed at Israel, to themselves.¹¹⁹ This is how Christianity as we know it started, as first a form of Judaism, steadily separating out (thanks mainly to Paul), as it moved away from Jerusalem.

Paul, a near contemporary of Jesus, expected the Parousia (or Second Coming) in his lifetime. Mark saw the destruction of the Temple as the beginning of the end, but by the time Matthew and Luke were written the Second Coming was already seen as some way off. Even so, the early Christians followed in the Jewish tradition of assuming a special place for themselves theologically: they rejected the Hellenistic idea, not just of polytheism but of a variegated approach to understanding the world, and insisted instead on historical particularity – that the divine had manifested itself uniquely via a specific individual at a specific time. Their concern with this particular event, and particular place, is – however accidental – one of the most momentous ideas yet conceived.