Read King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) Online
Authors: Robert Graves
King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics)
King Jesus
PENGUIN BOOKS
VIII The Trial of King Antipater
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, the son of Irish writer Perceval Graves and Amalia Von Ranke. He went from school to the First World War, where he became a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was seriously wounded at the Battle of the Somme. After that, apart from a year as Professor of English Literature at Cairo University in 1926, he earned his living by writing. His mostly historical novels include
I, Claudius; Claudius the God; Count Belisarius; Wife of Mr Milton; Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth; Proceed, Sergeant Lamb; The Golden Fleece; They Hanged My Saintly Billy
; and
The Isles of Unwisdom
. He wrote his autobiography,
Goodbye to All That
, in 1929, and it was soon established as a modern classic.
The Times Literary Supplement
acclaimed it as ‘one of the most candid self-portraits of a poet, warts and all, ever painted’, as well as being of exceptional value as a war document. His two most discussed non-fiction works are
The White Goddess
, a study of poetic inspiration, and
The Nazarine Gospel Restored
(with Joshua Podro), an examination of primitive Christianity. He also translated or co-translated Apuleius, Lucan, Suetonius and
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
for Penguin, and compiled the first modern dictionary of Greek Mythology,
The Greek Myths
. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1961 and made an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, in 1971.
Robert Graves died on 7 December 1985 in Majorca, his home since 1929. On his death
The Times
wrote of him, ‘He will be remembered for his achievements as a prose stylist, historical novelist and memoirist, but above all as the great paradigm of the dedicated poet, “the greatest love poet in English since Donne”.’ His
Complete Poems
, as well as many of his novels, is published in Penguin Classics.
When in
The Gospel according to the Egyptians
, Shelom asked the Lord: “How long shall death prevail ?” He answered : “So long as you women bear children….” And when she asked again: “I have done well then in not bearing children ?” He answered “Eat every plant but that which is bitter….” And when she enquired at what time the things concerning which she had questioned Him should be known, He answered: “When you women have trampled on the garment of shame and when the two become one, and when the male with the female is neither male nor female….” And the Saviour said in the same Gospel: “I have come to destroy the works of the Female.”
C
LEMENT OF
A
LEXANDRIA
(
Stromata
, iii)
…Commentators refer to Jeshu-ha-Notzri [i.e. Jesus] by mention of the wicked kingdom of Edom, since that was his nation…. He was hanged on a Passover Eve…. He was near to the Kingdom [i.e. in order of succession].
Balaam the Lame [i.e. Jesus] was 33 years old when Pintias the Robber [i.e. Pontius Pilate] killed him…. They say that his mother was descended from princes and rulers, but consorted with carpenters.
Lexicon Talmudicum, sub
“Abanarbel” and
Talmud Babli Sanhedrin
106b, 43a, 51a
Chapter One
Simpletons
I, A
GABUS
the Decapolitan began this work at Alexandria in the ninth year of the Emperor Domitian and completed it at Rome in the thirteenth year of the same.
1
It is the history of the wonder-worker Jesus, rightful heir-at-law to the dominions of Herod, King of the Jews, who in the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Governor-General of Judaea. Not the least wonderful of Jesus’s many feats was that, though certified dead by his executioners after a regular crucifixion, and laid in a tomb, he returned two days later to his Galilean friends at Jerusalem and satisfied them that he was no ghost ; then said farewell and disappeared in equally mysterious fashion. King Jesus (for he was entitled to be so addressed) is now worshipped as a god by a sect known as the Gentile Chrestians.
Chrestians is the commoner name for Christians, that is to say, “followers of the Anointed King”. Chrestians means “followers of the Chrestos, or Good Man”—good in the sense of simple, wholesome, plain, auspicious—and is therefore a term less suspect to the authorities than “Christians” ; for the word Christos suggests defiance of the Emperor, who has expressed his intention of stamping out Jewish nationalism once and for all. “Chrestos”, of course, can also be used in the derogatory sense of “simpleton”. “
Chrestos ei
” – “What a simple-minded fellow you are !”—were the very words which Pontius Pilate addressed in scorn to Jesus on the morning of crucifixion ; and since the Christians glory in their simplicity, which the most sincere of them carry to extravagant lengths, and in receiving the same scorn from the world as King Jesus himself, they do not refuse the name of “The Simpletons”.
Originally this faith was confined to Jews, who held a very different view of Jesus from that popularized by the Gentile Chrestians ; then it gradually spread from the Jews of Palestine to those of the Dispersion, whose communities are to be found in Babylonia, Syria, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Asia Minor, Libya, Spain—in fact, in almost every country of the world—and has now become international, with Gentiles decidedly in the majority. For the visionary Paul of Tarsus, who led the Gentile schism and was himself only a half-Jew, welcomed to membership of his Church the very numerous Gentile converts to the Jewish faith, known as God-fearers, who had shrunk from circumcision and the ritual rigours of Judaism and were thus precluded from becoming honorary Sons of Abraham. Paul declared that circumcision was un
necessary to salvation and that Jesus had himself made light of Jewish ceremonial laws on the ground that moral virtue outweighs ritual scrupulousness in the eyes of Jehovah, the Jewish God. Paul also assured them that Jesus (whom he had never met) had posthumously ordained that a symbolic eating of his body and drinking of his blood was to be a permanent institution in the Chrestian Church. This rite, known as the Eucharist, provides a welcome bridge between Judaism and the Greek and Syrian mystery-cults—I mean those in which the sacred body of Tammuz is sacramentally eaten and the sacred blood of Dionysus is sacramentally drunk ; and by this bridge thousands of converts have come over. The Judaic Chrestians, however, have rejected the Eucharist as idolatrous. They also have rejected as blasphemous the Gentile Chrestian view that Jesus stands in much the same relation to Jehovah as, for example, the God Dionysus does to Father Zeus, who begot him on the nymph Semele. A begotten God, the Jews say, must logically have a mother ; and they deny that Jehovah has ever had any truck with either nymphs or goddesses.
The fact is that the Jews as a nation have persuaded themselves that they differ in one main particular from all others that live on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea : namely, that they never owed any duty either to the Great Triple Moon-goddess who is generally reputed to have mothered the Mediterranean races, or to any other goddess or nymph whatsoever. This claim is untenable, for their sacred books preserve clear traces of their former attachment, notably in the accounts that they give of their heroes Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses. Indeed, that the Jews are at the present day perhaps the most miserable of all civilized nations—scattered, homeless, suspect—is ascribed by the superstitious to the Goddess’s ineluctable vengeance : for the Jews have been prime leaders in the religious movement against her not only in their own country but in all the countries of the Dispersion. They have proclaimed Jehovah as the sole Ruler of the Universe and represented the Goddess as a mere demoness, witch, Queen of Harlots, succuba and prime mischief-maker.
Jehovah, it seems clear, was once regarded as a devoted son of the Great Goddess, who obeyed her in all things and by her favour swallowed up a number of variously named rival gods and godlings—the Terebinth-god, the Thunder-god, the Pomegranate-god, the Bull-god, the Goat-god, the Antelope-god, the Calf-god, the Porpoise-god, the Ram-god, the Ass-god, the Barley-god, the god of Healing, the Moon-god, the god of the Dog-star, the Sun-god. Later (if it is permitted to write in this style) he did exactly what his Roman counterpart, Capitoline Jove, has done : he formed a supernal Trinity in conjunction with two of the Goddess’s three persons, namely, Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves, the counterparts of Juno and Minerva ; the remaining person, a sort of Hecate named Sheol, retiring to rule the infernal regions. Most Jews hold that she still reigns there, for they say : “Jehovah has no part in Sheol”, and quote the authority of the 115th Psalm : “The dead praise
not Jehovah, neither do any that go down into silence.” But Jove, whose wife and former mother, Juno, is still in sole charge of women’s affairs and whose so-called daughter Minerva still presides over all intellectual activities, and who is himself bisexual, has never cared to do what Jehovah did just before his enforced captivity at Babylon : that is, to repudiate his two Goddess partners and in solitary splendour attempt to rule over men and women alike. Nor has Olympian Zeus dared to do this. He also, it is said, was once the devoted son of the Triple Goddess and later, after castrating her paramour Cronos, annulled her sovereignty : but he leaves the charge of women’s affairs to his wife Hera, his sister Demeter, and his daughters Artemis, Aphrodite and Athene. Severity towards them he has certainly shown at times (if the mythographers are to be trusted), but he cannot rule satisfactorily without them. God without Goddess, the Romans and Greeks agree, is spiritual insufficiency ; but this the Jews deny.
In a somewhat obscene passage in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel is to be found Jehovah’s bill of divorcement against his two partner-Goddesses, who are there named Aholah and Aholibah. Nevertheless, the Trinity continued undissolved in a Jewish Temple at Elephantine in Upper Egypt until five hundred years ago.