Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (12 page)

The voice of the former exiles and the continuing exiled community in Babylon, who jointly regarded themselves as the true representatives of mainstream Judaism, was now heard in the increasing volume of sacred writings added in this 'Second Temple' period. Their preoccupations and the results of their new experiences went on permanently to colour Jewish religion. For instance, it may have been the fact that the scene of their exile was Babylon on the River Euphrates that led them to cherish the idea that the Patriarch Abram had come to their Promised Land from Ur, a city then near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They learned ancient tales, like the story well known throughout the Middle East about a great flood, and incorporated them in their own narrative of the ancient past. Jews still in Babylon picked up an interest in the long Babylonian tradition of observing and speculating on the stars and planets, and began contributing their own thoughts to the subject. More profoundly, post-Exilic Jews puzzled about how a loving God could have allowed the destruction of his Temple and the apparent overturning of all his promises to his people. One answer was to try to let God off the hook by conceiving of a being who devoted his time to thwarting God's purposes: he was called the Adversary,
Hassatan
, and although he was a fairly insignificant nuisance in the Hebrew scriptures, he grew in status in later Jewish literature, particularly among writers who were influenced by other religious cultures which spoke of powerful demonic figures. Hassatan caught the imagination of the Christian sect, and by the time that the Christian Book of Revelation was written, he had become a figure of cosmic significance now called Satan, depicted as the final adversary for God in the End Time.
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Judaism was nevertheless reluctant to make too much of any rival to God, having put such effort into affirming his sole and cosmic power. Some Jews felt that any questioning of or search for understanding of their tragedy was impious as well as a waste of energy. This is the message in the Book of Job, a tale which is the classic cry of pain and anger against unjust suffering, and which provides Satan's first major debut in biblical literature. Job's suffering arises not out of anything that he has done, for he is one of God's most loyal servants; it results from a peculiar and apparently heartless wager between God and Satan about his loyalty. It can only be resolved when Job fully submits to the mysterious will of God. A later writer nicknamed
Qoheleth
, the 'Preacher' or 'Teacher' (Greeks tried to translate this as 'Ecclesiastes'), approached the same problem in a different way. Dispensing with any story as a vehicle for what he wanted to say, he made a series of observations which form one of the most compelling and unexpected expressions in any sacred literature of resignation at the futility of human existence:

All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun . . . In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Qoheleth's smile at human folly is chillier than that of the Greek Cynics or Stoics; at the end, it falls away and dims into a description of the decay of old age moving towards the grave. Yahweh provides no comfort, but 'the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.'
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But this was not the only mood in post-Exilic Jewish literature. It was capable of directly contradicting Job and Qoheleth, with calls to activism in leading a morally upright life, such as those in the Book of Proverbs, whose cosy assertions of the value of everyday goodness have provided material for settled Jewish or Christian societies ever since. Writers seeking to rebuild Israel gave unambiguous answers to the great question aroused by Jewish experiences after 586. They created new sets of laws and careful restorations and extensions of past ceremonial practice in the Temple, taking care that most of it was represented as a return to ancient decrees of the Lord from before the Exile. They stated in ever more extreme terms the message of separation which had been the centrepiece of the Deuteronomistic reform movement; now they had the catastrophe of the Babylonian captivity to ram home the point that Yahweh wanted obedience to his law and had severely punished the nation for not providing that obedience. Never again should Israel make the same mistake.

On this principle was founded the continuing existence and development of Judaism. Like its daughter religion, Christianity, Judaism has often fostered the idea that it has an exclusive approach to the divine. Yet this claim to exclusivity was coupled with a remarkable new feature of Yahweh's religion - or perhaps really a return to its miscellaneous origins amid the displaced people of the
Habiru
. From this period under Persian rule comes an acceptance that it was not necessary to be born a Jew to enter the Jewish faith: what was necessary was to accept fully the customs of the Jews, including the rite of genital circumcision performed on all Jewish males. One could then be accepted as a convert ('proselyte', from a Greek word meaning 'stranger' or 'foreigner living in the land'). It was enough to accept the story which Judaism told: so in theory, Judaism could become a universal religion. Jews did not generally take that logical step of thought. It was left first to Christianity and then to Islam to make it a great theme of their faith.
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In the centuries after the return from Babylon, the Jews in Palestine were repeatedly faced with the same prospect of more powerful cultures overwhelming their own and overpowering them. Most disturbing was the coming of Hellenistic kingdoms, after Alexander the Great burst into the eastern Mediterranean in the 330s (see pp. 37-40). First, the Ptolemaic Pharaohs of Egypt ruled the land, and then (from 198 BCE) the Seleucids of Syria. The worst confrontation between Jewish identity and the Greek world surrounding it exploded into open violence when their second Seleucid overlord, King Antiochos IV (who boastfully called himself
Epiphanes
or 'Manifestation'), tried to force Greek customs on to the Jews and attacked the religious life centred on the Temple in Jerusalem. From 167 BCE the Jews rebelled against him, first under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus. With the unpromising exception of Judah's rebellion against Babylonian rule before the Exile, it was the first time that Jews had ever risen against any of their varied foreign masters over the previous centuries. The Maccabean rebels suffered terribly in this war, but they did succeed in winning independence for Judaea under a dynasty of native rulers, known from an earlier ancestor as the Hasmoneans. These descendants of heroes in the war of independence now formed a succession of high priests for the Jerusalem Temple.

During this period Judaea could claim to be a significant power in the Middle East, in a manner previously achieved in Jewish history only by the Solomonic kingdom (and Solomon's prestige might well have been exaggerated in Jewish historical writing). For a moment it looked as if God was finally satisfied with his people; and they did not forget the lesson that rebellion might pay off, a memory which was to have dire consequences in the rebellions against the Roman Empire (see pp. 106-11). Protestant Christians are not generally familiar with the Books of Maccabees, because in the sixteenth-century Reformation they were among the works sidelined from the Bible and relegated to the so-called Apocrypha (see page 68). Judaism takes a very different view of them: these are among the most important stories of Jewish history, the centrepiece, for instance, of the great festival of Hanukkah. It is possible that two hymns to be found in the Christian New Testament and much used in Christian liturgy, Mary's song (the
Magnificat
) and the thanksgiving of John the Baptist's father, Zechariah (the
Benedictus
), are lightly adapted victory songs associated with the Maccabees.
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It is at this period that Jews were first described by the Greek
Ioudaios
, a word which could be applied to all Jewish people who looked to the life of the Jerusalem Temple, whether they lived in Judaea or not.
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Many now were far away. Both the Jews' long history of military misfortunes and their energy and enterprise had resulted in a Jewish dispersal far beyond Palestine or the remaining Jewish community in Babylon. All around the seaports of the Mediterranean there developed Jewish communities which honoured Jerusalem and which, if they could, joined pilgrimages to the Temple, which was becoming one of the most important goals for religious journeyings in the ancient world. In their everyday lives, far from Jerusalem, Jews kept their sense of identity and community in meeting places which significantly had a Greek name, synagogue.

Synagogues were remarkable institutions, with little other parallel in the ancient world. They were not temples, because with the exception of a few insignificant rival institutions Jewish sacrifice now took place only in the Jerusalem Temple, yet from the start synagogues seem to have had a religious function. The first evidence of them comes from Jewish inscriptions in Greek in Egypt, where they are at first and even as late as the fourth century called a 'prayer house' -
proseuche
- rather than
synagoge
, which neutrally means 'an assembly'.
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So synagogues were the setting for prayer and the reading of sacred scripture, but they also provided a focus for the general activities of the community - especially education. This was not just education for an elite, as was the case in Greek society, but education for everyone in the Jewish community; and it had a strong moral emphasis, unlike the concentration on cultic practice in the many other religions of the Mediterranean world. Judaism could make claim to providing a philosophy of life as well as a series of observances and customs for approaching the divine, an unusual feature in ancient religion. The life of the synagogue and the assumptions of a well-instructed, well-ordered and uniformly observant community that it fostered furnished an attractive and distinctive model which Christianity later readily imitated as it developed its own separate institutions.
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If worship in the synagogue centred on the reading of God's word from written texts, this demanded that there should be common consent throughout the Jewish community in the Mediterranean as to what could and could not be read. The long process of creating and re-editing texts now approached something like completion, and a number of books, twenty-four in all, came to be recognized as having a special status. It is difficult to say exactly when this happened: in Jewish tradition the decision is said to have been made in a 'Great Assembly' in 450 BCE, but that is a fairly typical historical back-projection of a process which was probably gradual and incremental. In fact it must have been completed at a much later date, especially since some books within the collection, like the prophecies of Daniel, patently cannot be as old as the fifth century BCE, whatever superficial claims they make to a particular antiquity. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing soon after the death of Jesus Christ, provides the first known reference to a particular number, twenty-two, but the first reference to the choice of the twenty-four is in a work known as IV Ezra (confusingly contained in a larger work commonly known as II Esdras). By its content IV Ezra can be dated as late as the time of the Roman Emperor Domitian, towards the end of the first century CE, just a little later than Josephus. This reference also makes clear that a larger number of other books, supposedly seventy, were no longer to be treated as having the same degree of authority as the twenty-four.
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The whole collection of authorized and privileged texts came to be known by a Hebrew word,
Tanakh
. This was actually a symbolic acronym formed from the three initial Hebrew letters of the three category names of books it contained: Law, Prophets and Writings. The last is a rather vague catch-all term for history, psalms and writings containing wise sayings, and the categories are not altogether helpful as concepts: books which are mainly historical are to be found among both Prophets and Writings, while Job and Qoheleth nestle among the Writings, despite their prophetic brutality towards the sort of common-sense advice for coping with everyday life which is represented by the Wisdom literature of the Writings - works like the Book of Proverbs, for example.

The Tanakh is recognizable to Christians as their Old Testament, albeit arranged in a different order. Beyond it, reflecting and in some cases obviously including the symbolic seventy rejected books, are a series of texts which neither Jews nor Christians afforded the same special status, but which have had a large influence on both religious traditions. Some of these books were actually added to the Tanakh by Jews in Greek-speaking settings such as Alexandria (see p. 69), and hence the early Christians, also Greek-speaking, regarded them as having the full status of God's word. During the fourth century CE doubts began to be expressed by some Christian commentators, who gave them the description '
apocrypha
' ('hidden things'). In the sixteenth-century Reformation of the Western Church, Protestants made a definite decision to exclude them from what Christians term the 'canon' of recognized scripture.
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For Protestants, this had the useful effect of undercutting various doctrines held by that part of the Western Church still loyal to the pope, doctrines which could find biblical warrant only within books of the Apocrypha. Martin Luther duly fished these extra books out of the general assemblage of scripture, yet he kept them in an appendix to his German Bible of 1534, and the Church of England allowed some samples of them to be read in public worship; other Protestants dropped them altogether.

Still further out than the Apocrypha in terms of biblical respectability are a great number of texts which vary in date from the second century BCE to the first CE. Christian scholars give them the loaded title of 'Inter-Testamental literature', works falling between what Christians call the Old and New Testaments - clearly not a term which has any meaning within the Jewish tradition. Within this literature there is a preoccupation with telling the story of the Last Days, when the wretchedness and suffering of Israel in the present would be given a glorious reward and God's purposes made clear: this genre of text is called 'apocalyptic' (from the Greek for 'revelation'), and the Tanakh admitted one set of examples of it, some sections of the Book of Daniel.
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Like Daniel, many of these books make a bid for the respectability of age by taking the name of some biblical worthy recognizable from the Tanakh: for instance, various books reach way beyond the Patriarchs to claim the authorship of Enoch, father of Methuselah. For one of these books, the gamble on antiquity has paid off in Christian history: I Enoch is explicitly quoted by one obscure writer called Jude, whose epistle did manage to worm its way into the New Testament canon, and I Enoch is also treated as mainstream inspired scripture by the Christian Church of Ethiopia.
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An interesting variety of Christian traditions and assumptions is based on this array of books; they were largely forgotten in mainstream Christianity, yet they were part of the mental furniture of the generation of Jesus and his disciples.