King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (47 page)

It was by chance that I first became an authority on Chrestianity. An old sick Ebionite bishop who took refuge in my house at Alexandria during the persecutions volunteered to make me the repository of what he claimed was the only pure Chrestian tradition.

“Why do you propose to honour me with your confidence ?” I asked. “I am not a Chrestian.”

“Because, though no Chrestian, you have shown me Chrestian loving-kindness ; because you have studied our Law and Prophets more closely than many Jews ; and because to-day, like the prophet Elijah, I can justly complain to our God : ‘I only am left, and they seek to take my life also.’ ”

“What do you mean by Chrestian loving-kindness ?”

“You risked denunciation and looked for no reward.”

“May I prove worthy of your trust,” I told the poor fellow.

Yet I could see that he had fearful qualms about revealing the secret tradition to me, and would never have done so had he not feared that it would otherwise be lost for ever. He cried bitterly : “The traitors of Rome and Syria defile the holy truth and make a monster of him
whose memory I honour above all others and whom I would have the whole world likewise honour.”

I could not agree to this condemnation of the Gentile Chrestians as a whole, and the investigations that I have since undertaken prove that the present members of the Church, being unaware on what insecure historical ground their doctrine rests, cannot fairly be characterized as traitors. They have, moreover, shown remarkable fortitude under imperial persecution, and when it is considered from what dregs of society many of them are recruited—here at Alexandria few of them would be eligible for initiation into the Greek Mysteries and not all of them could even qualify for membership of an ordinary drinking-club—it is wonderful what a reputation for decency and fair dealing they have built up. Yet clearly the trend and end and scope of Jesus’s preaching cannot be properly understood except in the light of the authority by which he preached ; and clearly, too, the founders of the Gentile Churches so strangely misunderstood his mission that they have made him the central figure of a new cult which, were he alive now, he could regard only with detestation and horror. They present him as a Jew of doubtful percentage, a renegade who abrogated the Mosaic Law and, throwing in his lot with the Greek Gnostics, pretended to a sort of Apollonian divinity, and this too on credentials which must be accepted on blind faith—I suppose because no reasonable person could possibly accept them otherwise. But, as has already been shown, Jesus was in fact not only royally born but as scrupulous in his observance of the Mosaic Law as any Jew who ever lived, and spent his entire life in trying to persuade his fellow-countrymen that there never had been, was not, and never could be, any other true god but the God of Israel. He once even refused the title “good master”, addressed to him by a courteous stranger, on the ground that only God is good.

As a sacred King, the last legitimate ruler of an immensely ancient dynasty, his avowed intention was to fulfil all the ancient prophecies that concerned himself and bring the history of his House to a real and unexceptionable conclusion. He intended by an immense exercise of ) power and perfect trust in God the Father to annul the boastful tradition of royal pomp—dependent on armies, battles, taxes, mercantile adventures, marriages with foreign princesses, Court luxury and popular oppression—which King Solomon had initiated at Jerusalem ; and at the same time to break the lamentable cycle of birth, procreation, death and rebirth in which both he and his subjects had been involved since Adam’s day. Merely to resign his claim to temporal power was not enough. His resolute hope was to defeat Death itself by enduring with his people the so-called Pangs of the Messiah, the cataclysmic events which were the expected prelude to the coming of the Kingdom of God ; and his justification of this hope was the prophecy in the twenty-fifth chapter of Isaiah : “He shall destroy Death for ever.” In the Kingdom, which would be miraculously fertile and perfectly pacific, all Israelites would be his subjects who acknowledged him in his threefold capacity
as king, prophet and healer, and under his benignant rule would live wholly free from error, want, sickness or fear of death for no less than a thousand years.

The Kingdom, it seems, was to consist of various estates, comprising various degrees of initiates. He himself was the destined Sovereign, personally answerable to God the Father and in direct authority over the tribe of Judah. Under him would serve twelve rulers, his twelve gilgal-pillars, each set in authority over one of the remaining twelve tribes. They would consist of the six disciples already named—Judas, Peter, James, John, Andrew, Thomas—and six more whom he chose in the Garden of Galilee after his Nazareth visit—Philip, Bartholomew, Simon of Cana, James the Less, Matthew and Thaddaeus. These twelve, together with three hidden disciples—Nicanor the Essene ; Nicodemon son of Gorion, a member of the Sanhedrin ; and his own half-brother James the Ebionite—were to form his Inner Council, divided into three groups of five, namely, the healers, the prophets and the law-givers. Jesus designated Peter, James, John, Andrew and Thomas as the chosen healers ; Judas, Philip, Bartholomew, Simon of Cana, James the Less as the chosen prophets ; and Matthew, Thaddaeus, Nicanor, Nicodemon and James the Ebionite as the chosen law-givers. All these were Israelites, and they were to be assisted by a Grand Council of seventy-two, also Israelites. Five district synods, representative of the synagogues, would be obedient to this central body of spiritual government.

Women would have no part in government, yet they would be honoured citizens of the Kingdom and permitted to form sacred choirs, as among the Essene Therapeutics of Egypt, and even to prophesy, for according to Pharisaic tradition : “The man is not to be without the woman, nor the woman without the man, nor are both together to be without the Glory of the Lord.” Other nations would be given the status of either allies or subject allies in a world empire dominated by the Kingdom of Israel ; but the function of the Israelites was to be not arrogant overlords of the rest but the world’s moral exemplars, and they would therefore be bound by the strictest observance of the Law. The allies would be bound by a general moral law and the acknowledgement of God’s supreme sovereignty ; and the same demands for holiness would not be immediately made from those whose closest link with the Israelites was a common descent from Noah—among them the Armenians, the Cypriots, the Ionians, the Assyrians and the Cimmerians of Northern Britain—as from those who, like the Arabians, Edomites and Dorians, could claim to be descended from Abraham. But before the thousand years were over, even the savage Moors and cannibalistic Finns would adopt circumcision and the Law and become true Children of Light.

Many men whom Jesus summoned to be his disciples excused themselves on one ground or another. To one who said : “I will come when my old father dies,” he replied : “Let the dead bury their dead, as in the Egyptian fable.”

“Not yet, not yet !”

He was convinced that the Kingdom of God was close at hand, though the hour and day of its coming were known only to God himself, and that multitudes of those to whom he preached would survive the dreadful terrors that were to announce it, and would therefore never experience death. At the end of the thousand years, the physical world would come to an end, and a general Resurrection and Day of Judgement ensue : then the Kingdom of God would merge in the Kingdom of Heaven, a purely spiritual existence in which the souls of righteous men would become radiant elements of God’s glory. In this firm belief he set out to refine religious faith and practice, choosing the best doctrinal elements from all the different sects of Jewry—including the Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots and Anavim, or Messianic mystics—and correlating these with the generous, yet scrupulous, Pharisaic system. He would travel the Holy Land from end to end, like a shepherd who rounds up his strayed sheep ; even visiting Samaria, where the peasants belonged to the old Israelite stock, though the priesthood and aristocracy were foreigners who had originally embraced Judaism as a convenience.

In a version of the Acts and Sayings of Jesus current in the Roman Church, an incident of Jesus’s audacious visit to the Samaritans is characteristically presented as having occurred at Jerusalem. And how clumsy the forgery is! Jesus is recorded as saving the life of a woman whom the Pharisees are about to stone for adultery by the simple ruse of saying : “Let the man among you who is sinless cast the first stone !” But for the past hundred years the law for the stoning of a Jewish adulteress had been a dead letter : she must be brought to Jerusalem for trial, even if taken in the act elsewhere. She needed only to plead ignorance of the Law before the Pharisaic High Court and she was acquitted, though liable to be divorced and warned before two witnesses never to meet her paramour again. She did not even lose her rights under the marriage contract. Where adultery was only suspected, not proved, she was given “bitter water” to drink in proof of her innocence ; then if she died she was proved guilty, but since the bitter water was merely a strong purge, she was invariably proved innocent. It was only in Samaria that the penalty against adulteresses and their paramours was exacted with primitive fury.

In the same volume occurs another absurdity. According to the original Aramaic version, Jesus, in dispute with a Sadducee, tells the story of a Samaritan who goes from Jerusalem to Jericho and on the way is robbed, wounded and stripped by bandits. A priest passes by on the other side of the road, so does a Levite, but a simple God-loving Israelite takes him up, dresses his wounds, sets him on his own ass, and conveys him to an inn where he will be cared for. The moral of the story is that the common people of Israel—the common people educated in the Pharisaic synagogues—are more religious-minded than the Temple priesthood, and that when the Kingdom of God is established it will contain very few of the natural religious leaders of Israel : “The first shall be the last ; the last shall be the first.” The Sadducees had, indeed, for
centuries refused the Samaritans entry into the Inner Courts of the Temple and regarded them as unclean ; which explains the reluctance of the priest and the Levite to aid the wounded man. Jesus, though aware of the Samaritans’ faults, was declaring that the breach between them and the Jews—which had greatly widened since the defilement of the Court of the Priests twenty years before—must be speedily healed, and could be healed only by generosity. But in the Roman version the text has been amended to emphasize the Gentile Chrestians’ dislike of the Pharisees and of the Jews generally. The occasion of the story is presented as a dispute between Jesus and a Pharisee, while in the story itself the nationality of the victim is not mentioned and the kindly God-fearing Israelite is no longer an Israelite but a Samaritan. Again, what a clumsy forgery! The amended story does not make literary sense. It is as though one were to substitute “Carthaginian” for “Citizen” in a Roman moral tale of how Senator, Knight and Citizen behaved in some social crisis ; for Priest, Levite and Israelite are the three estates of Jewry, as the three estates of Rome are Senator, Knight and Citizen. Moreover, the context in which according to both versions Jesus spoke the parable was his quotation of the text : “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, to which the Sadducee replied : “But who is my neighbour ?” The answer forced from him : “The man to whom the Israelite showed mercy”, has been illogically changed in the Roman version to “The man who showed mercy to the Israelite”.

On one or two recorded occasions Jesus did criticize individual Pharisees, but never the sect as a whole. His words were directed either against those who failed in their high moral pretensions, or against outsiders who falsely pretended to be Pharisees—especially certain Roman or Herodian agents who, taking advantage of his dialectical method of teaching, tried to entrap him into revolutionary statements.

Jesus belonged to the direct line of the famous teachers of ethics of whom Hillel the Pharisee was the most humane and enlightened, and for this reason refrained from committing his thoughts to paper. The Pharisees well understood the tyranny of the written word. By Jesus’s time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmers, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sickbed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about : his authority may not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance : “It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns”, this is taken to mean : “It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill.”

Hillel and his fellow-Pharisees insisted on a very close observance of the Law in so far as it was still practicable and inoffensive to their enlightened sense of divine mercy. But their glosses on the Law were oral
and thus easily discarded when lapse of years proved them inaccurate or misleading. They recommended the tithing not only of wheat and fruit and other staple products but of garden herbs as well ; at the same time they softened the rigour of the Law wherever to obey the letter would be to dishonour the spirit. For example, the stoning of adulterers and adulteresses. The Pharisees’ view was as follows : “Either women are in general responsible creatures and should take the same part in religion as the men ; or else they are irresponsible and must be limited in their activities. It occasionally happens in small country synagogues that educated and pious women are elected as synagogue officials ; but for the most part women show no aptitude for religious learning and are not encouraged to attempt it. In Deuteronomy the ordinance occurs : ‘You shall teach these laws to your sons’ ; daughters are not specified. An uneducated woman must therefore not be held responsible for any failure in chastity, since the man who has lain with her is likely to know the Law better than she. Moses, indeed, assumed in women a sufficient knowledge of the Law to make unchastity punishable with Death, and issued his regulations accordingly, but women were more responsible in those days than they are now, because the wilderness offered them fewer temptations than the city or the village and they were privileged to hear Moses’s own utterances. Should we then stone the adulterer and let the adulteress go free? No, this would be manifestly unjust, since it would put the life of the weak man at the mercy of the predatory woman ; and even our Father Adam was not proof against a woman’s wanton smiles. Let us therefore leave them both to repentance and God’s mercy ; for he created our Mother Eve and he alone understands the heart of an adulterous woman. Is it not written : ‘Such is the way of an adulteress : she eats, she wipes her mouth, she says : “I have done no wickedness’ ” ?”