Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (9 page)

Yet the new order of politics was deeply depressing for the battered remains of the old Roman upper classes. They were no more taken in than anyone else by the Emperor's Republican window-dressing. They had done well out of the old Republic, and they had the sense to see that they could do well out of Augustus's regime, but they felt the humiliation deeply. Worst of all was the increasing reverence paid to Augustus. He did not actually claim divine honours, but he raised no objection to a system of honours in which offerings and sacrifices were made to his
genius
, the sacred force or guardian spirit which guided his personality and actions; Roman religion had already accommodated the habit of paying divine honours to such abstractions.
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After Augustus's death, his successors in any case did declare him a god, and subsequent emperors saw the usefulness of this: the consecration of a predecessor as divine gave the living emperor prestige and legitimacy as well as glorifying the dead. Some of Augustus's successors explicitly assumed the role of a god in their lifetimes, and although this was politically risky at first, by the late third century it had become routine for emperors to claim divine status. Aristocratic Romans resented worshipping a man who had once been a colleague. A note of regret for the past, of merely grudging respect for the emperor, runs through much literature of the early empire, particularly in the surviving work of the first-century-CE historian Tacitus. It was no coincidence that, as in Hellenistic culture, Stoicism became one of the most influential philosophical stances in Rome. As long as the western part of the Roman Empire lasted, this regret never wholly left the old aristocracy - or the newly rich, who were anxious to take on aristocratic manners and attitudes.

So, over the next two centuries and more, divine honours were paid to a political leader whose position in the empire often came from a nakedly brutal seizure of power. This divine leader attached himself to the traditional gods of Rome (a pantheon rather like that of the Greeks). For many aristocratic Romans there would now be a complex of emotions associated with this amalgam of the political and the divine. Traditional duty demanded that they take their part in ancient cults: the worship of the pantheon and the priesthoods associated with it were inseparable from Roman identity, and pride in that identity might trump any quasi-Republican distaste for the honours accorded the emperor. Beyond the elite, there was no reason why enthusiasm for the old gods should die among the mass of ordinary Romans.
³⁷
The imperial cult itself is testimony to the continuing appeal of the Roman pantheon, as otherwise it would not have been worth the investment. But the powerful were now well advised to keep an eye on how the emperor treated the many religions of his subjects. Whatever religion any individual emperor chose to favour would arouse the same set of associations between politics and the world beyond as the imperial cult encouraged by Augustus. There were plenty of unofficial competitors to the Roman pantheon, now that gods of all names and descriptions were able to take holiday trips along the sailing routes of a Mediterranean Sea united by Roman military might. Fertility cults in plenty arrived from the East, or more reflective religions like Iranian Mithraism, which described life as a great struggle between light and darkness, good and evil. Among the contenders for the notice of emperors and the Roman people, few people at first noticed or took seriously a newly emerged eccentric little Jewish sect on the fringes of the synagogues.

2

Israel (
c
. 1000 BCE-100 CE)

A PEOPLE AND THEIR LAND

Along the south-eastern end of the Mediterranean coast lies a land difficult to name. In a very remote past it was called Canaan, but its later turbulent history left it with two names, Israel and Palestine, both of which are in use today, and both of which carry a heavy weight of emotion and contested identity. For one people, the Jews, the land is the Promised Land, granted to them in solemn pronouncements made by God to a succession of their forefathers; Jews are so called from what was originally the southern part of it, Judah or in Greek Judaea, which contrived to keep its independence from great empires longer than its rival northern kingdom, which had arrogated to itself the name of Israel. Christians have their own name for Palestine or Israel: they call it the Holy Land, because Jesus Christ was born and died here. He was executed outside the city of Jerusalem, once briefly the capital of a united kingdom of Israel. The name Jerusalem (often called Zion after its citadel) echoes through the sacred songs of the Jews, in accents of longing or joy, and Christians have sung the same texts.

Jerusalem has preserved its ancient and medieval walls intact, and even with the extensions to their area made in the Roman period, the old city usually surprises those who visit it for the first time by how small it is. Yet great human longing and passions are focused on that small compass. Medieval Christians made maps of the world with Jerusalem at the centre, and it is the setting for one of the most ancient and revered shrines of Islam, built on the site of the Temple which long before had been the centre of Jewish worship. So Jerusalem is resonant for all three linked monotheistic faiths, often with tragic consequences as they have fought each other to gain exclusive control over this small city.
¹
Jerusalem is the contested heart of Palestine or Israel, whose modest overall extent, no more than 150 miles by 100 miles when undivided, belies its importance in the history of the world. Those without some idea of its geography and climate will not fully understand the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, whose horizons it sets.

For all its small area, its geography is complicated. The coast has few decent harbours, and other peoples than the Children of Israel tended to dominate the ones that did exist, so the Jews never became seafarers (and generally made rather negative references to the sea and its creatures in their sacred writings). Along the coast runs a wide fertile plain, backed to the east by a north-south spine of hills which in the north become mountains; Jerusalem sits in the middle of the hill country. Before the hills rise to mountains in the north, they curve to the coast, enclosing the Kishon river valley running down to the sea. Through this curve of hills there is only one major north-south pass, guarded by an ancient strongpoint now called Megiddo. This is the chief passage point for land traffic from Egypt north-east to all the lands of the Middle East and beyond, especially the successive civilizations which rose and fell around the great rivers of Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates. It is not surprising, therefore, that the great powers of the ancient world repeatedly fought over such a strategic place. This geographical accident has given the Holy Land a major international importance, to its inhabitants' misfortune. Such was the accumulated weight of memory of those contests between great powers at Megiddo that it came to symbolize the place of ultimate battles: Christians will know it better from their own sacred writings as Armageddon, singled out by the writer of Revelation as the setting for the ultimate cosmic conflict between the forces of evil and divine goodness.
²

On its long eastern flank, the spine of hills falls away into the spectacular valley of the Jordan river, which flows from north to south. That river boundary was rich with symbolism for the Jews, who remembered it as the barrier which they had to cross into their Promised Land. Towards the river's northern end is a major lake, the Sea of Galilee, around which lay the communities which were home to Jesus and his early disciples. At its southern end, the river does something very strange: it flows into and ends in the Dead Sea, a huge landlocked lake, much bigger than the Sea of Galilee. Here the heat of the arid, rocky valley is such that millions of gallons of Jordan water rushing into the lake evaporate, needing no other outlet and leaving the water so exceptionally salty as to bear up the most helpless of non-swimmers. Water is indeed a constant concern throughout Israel/Palestine: deserts stretch to the south into the Sinai peninsula and to the east beyond the hills of Transjordan, and the further south one travels anywhere in the land, the less rain there is. Most winds bearing rain come west from the sea, and winds from the eastern deserts bear a deadly, parching heat. Summer is a time to dread: spring harvest time is over and there is always the fear that no rain will fall to make the next year's growth possible. The generally fragile fertility of the soil is a preoccupation of its people; it was one of the distinctive features of the Jews that they became fiercely opposed to rival religions stressing a concern with fertility, while at the same time they stubbornly maintained their attachment to their complex, difficult territory. Their holy books told them how they had fought to win it, trusting in ancient promises of God, how they had lost it and won it once more. These were the stories which Jesus learned in his childhood village in Galilee.

2. Palestine: the Geography

The Hebrew sacred books give a detailed picture of the history of the Israelites and their lineage, right back to the first humans created by God. The relationship of this detail to history as practised and understood by modern historians raises deeply felt arguments about the 'reliability' of sacred literature: hence any discussion of that history is a delicate matter, and no doubt many will contest the following attempt to reconstruct it.
³
The first book of scripture, Genesis, has accounts of leaders who have come to be known as Patriarchs, beginning with Abram, who is pictured as coming from Ur in what is now Iraq and receiving a repeated promise from God that his descendants will receive the land, symbolized by a new name given him by God, Abraham, 'Father of Multitudes'.
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Around Abraham's rackety grandson Jacob are woven several engaging tales of outrageous cheating and deceit, and they culminate in an all-night wrestling match with a mysterious stranger who overcomes Jacob and is able to give him another new name, Israel, meaning 'He who strives with God'.
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Out of that fight in the darkness, with one who revealed the power of God and was God, began the generations of the Children of Israel. Few peoples united by a religion have proclaimed by their very name that they struggle against the one whom they worship. The relationship of God with Israel is intense, personal, conflicted. Those who follow Israel and the religions which spring from his wrestling match that night are being told that even through their harshest and most wretched experiences of fighting with those they love most deeply, they are being given some glimpse of how they relate to God.

Using the Bible's own internal points of reference, the promises to the Patriarchs would have been made in a period around 1800 BCE. But this raises problems, even if one simply reads the whole biblical text attentively. One silence is significant: there is very little reference to the Patriarchs in the pronouncements of 'later' great prophets like Jeremiah, Hosea or the first prophet known as Isaiah, whose prophetic words date from the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. It is as if these supposedly basic stories of Israel's origins a thousand years before were largely missing from the consciousness of Jeremiah, Hosea and Isaiah, whereas references to the Patriarchs appear abundantly in material which is of sixth-century or later date. The logic of this is that the stories of the Patriarchs, as we now meet them in the biblical text,
post-date
rather than predate the first great Hebrew prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries, even though various stories embedded in the Book of Genesis are undoubtedly very ancient.
⁶

It is also striking that certain incidents in the stories of the Patriarchs mirror incidents which took place in a more definitely 'historical' context, six centuries after 1800. Obvious lurid examples are the duplicated threats of gang rape to guests in a city (with dire consequences for the perpetrators), to be found in both Genesis 19 and Judges 19. Similarly the Children of Israel, with a carelessness that Lady Bracknell would have deplored, twice put to the sword the unfortunate city of Shechem, once in Genesis 34 and again in Judges 9. Another problem: the patriarchal narratives contain one or two references to Philistines, who come from a later period of history, and there are many more to a people who are close relatives of the Patriarchs, called Aramaeans - Abraham is very precisely given a kinship to the Aramaeans in one family tree.
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The settlement of Aramaeans in areas reasonably close to the land of Canaan/ Israel/Palestine was a gradual process, but other historical evidence shows that it cannot have begun any earlier than 1200 BCE, and that was a very different era from the supposed time of the Patriarchs; their arrival was in a time which followed a further great upheaval in the story of the Children of Israel.
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Altogether, the chronology of the Book of Genesis simply does not add up as a historical narrative when it is placed in a reliably historical wider context.