The Case for God (18 page)

The Mishnah did not cling nervously to the Hebrew Bible, but held proudly aloof and rarely quoted the old scriptures. It felt no need to discuss its relation to the Sinai tradition, but loftily assumed that its competence was beyond question. The rabbis continued to love and revere the older scriptures, but knew that the world they represented had gone forever; like the Christians, they took from them what they needed and respectfully laid the rest to one side. Religion must be allowed to move forward freely and could not be constrained by misplaced loyalty to the past. Divine revelation, they decided, had come in two forms: a written Torah and an ongoing Oral Torah that evolved from one generation to another. Both were sacred, both came from God, but the rabbis valued the Oral Torah more than any written scripture because this living tradition reflected the fluctuations of human thought and kept the Word responsive to change. Undue reliance on a written text could encourage inflexibility and backward-looking timidity.
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The insights of all Jews—past, present, and to come—had been anticipated symbolically in the Sinai revelation, so when they developed the Oral Torah together in their discussions in the House of Studies, the rabbis felt as though they were standing beside Moses on the mountaintop, and were participating in a never-ending conversation with the great sages of the past and with their God. They were the recipients of God’s word just as surely as were the ancient prophets and patriarchs.
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The two Talmuds moved even more firmly away from the Bible. The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled during the fifth century, and the more authoritative Babylonian Talmud (known as the Bavli) a century later, were commentaries on the Mishnah, not the Bible. Like the New Testament, the Bavli was regarded as the completion of the Hebrew Bible, a new revelation for a changed world.
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As Christians
would always read the Hebrew Bible from the perspective of the New Testament, Jews would study it only in conjunction with the Bavli, which completely transformed it. The author-editors felt free to reverse the Mishnah’s legislation, play one rabbi off against another, and point out serious gaps in their arguments. They did exactly the same with the Bible, even suggesting what the biblical authors should have said and substituting their own rulings for biblical law. The Bavli gave no definitive answers to the many questions it raised. We hear many different voices: Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, the early Pharisees, and the rabbis of Yavneh were all brought together on the same page, so that they seem to be on the same level and taking part in a communal debate across the centuries.

The study of Talmud is democratic and open-ended. If a student finds that none of these august authorities resolve a problem to his satisfaction, he must sort it out for himself. The Bavli has thus been described as the first interactive text.
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Because students are taught to follow the rabbinic method of study, they engage in the same discussions and must make their own contribution to this never-ending conversation. In some versions of the Talmud, there was a space on each page for a student to add his own commentary. He learned that nobody had the last word, that truth was constantly changing, and that while tradition was of immense importance, it must not compromise his own judgment. If he did not add his own remarks to the sacred page, the line of tradition would come to an end. Religious discourse should not be cast in stone; the ancient teachings required constant revision. “What is Torah?” asked the Bavli. “It is the interpretation of Torah.”
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As Christianity spread in the Hellenistic world, the more educated converts brought with them the insights and expectations of their own Greek education. From an early date, they regarded Christianity as a
philosophia
that had much in common with the Greek schools. It took courage to become a Christian, as the churches were subjected to sporadic but intense bouts of persecution by the Roman authorities. When Jesus had failed to return, Jewish Christianity petered out, and by the beginning of the second century, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism had parted company. Once Christians made it clear that they were no longer members of the synagogue, they were regarded by the
Romans as impious fanatics who had committed the cardinal sin of breaking with the parent faith. Christians were accused of atheism because they refused to honor the patronal gods of the empire, so some tried to prove that Christianity was no
superstitio
but a new school of philosophy.

One of the earliest of these apologists was Justin (100–160), a pagan convert from Samaria in the Holy Land. He had dabbled in Stoicism and Pythagorean spirituality but found what he was looking for in Christianity, which he regarded as the culmination of both Judaism and Greek philosophy. Philosophers also saw their great sages— Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epicurus—as “sons of God,” and Christians used the same kind of terminology—Logos, Spirit, and God—as the Stoics. In the prologue to his gospel, Saint John had said that Jesus was the incarnate “Word” or “Logos” of God
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—the very same Logos, Justin argued, that had inspired Plato and Socrates. There was no Greek equivalent to the Hebrew
Shekhinah
, so increasingly Christians used the term
Logos
to describe the divine Presence that they could experience but that was essentially separate from God’s inmost nature. Justin was not an intellectual of the first caliber, but his conception of Christ as the eternal Logos was crucial to the theologians who developed the seminal ideas of Christianity and are therefore known as the “fathers” of the Church.

The Greek-educated fathers sought references to the Logos in every sentence of the Hebrew Bible. Finding the Hebrew texts difficult to understand and the ancient biblical ethos somewhat alien, they transformed them into an allegory, in which all the events and characters of what they called the Old Testament became precursors of Christ in the New. The Christians of Antioch preferred to concentrate on the literal sense of scripture and discover what the biblical authors themselves had intended to teach, but they were not as popular as the exegetes of Alexandria, who followed in the footsteps of Philo and the Greek allegorists.

One of the most brilliant and influential of these early exegetes was Origen (185–254), who had studied
allegoria
with Greek and Jewish scholars in Alexandria and midrash with rabbis in Palestine. In his search for the deeper significance of scripture, Origen did not cavalierly cast the original aside but took the plain sense of scripture very seriously. He learned Hebrew, consulted rabbis about Jewish lore,
studied the flora and fauna of the Holy Land, and, in a mammoth effort to establish the best possible text, set the Hebrew alongside five different Greek translations. But he believed that it was impossible for a modern, Greek-educated Christian to read the Bible in a wholly literal manner. How could anybody imagine that God had really “walked” in the Garden of Eden? What possible relevance to Christians were the lengthy instructions for the construction of a tabernacle in the Sinai wilderness? Was a Christian obliged to take literally Christ’s instruction that his disciples should never wear shoes? What could we make of the highly dubious story of Abraham selling his wife to Pharaoh? The answer was to treat these difficult texts as
allegoria
, the literary form that describes one thing under the guise of another.

Indeed, Origen argued, the glaring anomalies and inconsistencies in scripture forced us to look beyond the literal sense. God had planted these “stumbling blocks and interruptions of the historical sense” to make us look deeper. These “impossibilities and incongruities … present a barrier to the reader and lead him to refuse to proceed along the pathway of the ordinary meaning.”
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Origen never tired of telling his readers that exegesis was hard work and that, like any philosophical exercise, it required discipline and dedication. Like any philosopher, the exegete must live a life of prayer, purity, sobriety, and virtue; he must be prepared to study all night long.
⁷⁴
But if he persevered, he would find that “in the very act of reading and diligently studying” these outwardly unpromising texts, he would feel “touched by the divine spirit (
pneuma).”
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For the Christians as for the rabbis, scripture was a symbol, its words and stories merely the outward “images of divine things.”
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For Origen, exegesis was a
musterion
, an initiation that required hard labor but finally brought the
mystes
into the divine presence.
⁷⁷

Like a human person, scripture consisted of a body, a psyche, and a spirit that transcended mortal nature; these corresponded to the three senses in which scripture could be understood. The
mystes
had to master the “body” of the sacred text (its
literal
sense) before he could progress to anything higher. Then he was ready for the
moral
sense, an interpretation that represented the “psyche,” the natural powers of mind and heart: it provided us with ethical guidance but was largely a matter of common sense. The
mystes
that pressed on to the end of
his initiation was introduced to the
spiritual
, allegorical sense, when he encountered the Word that lay hidden in the earthly body of the sacred page.

But this would not be possible without the spiritual exercises that put the
mystes
into a different frame of mind. At first Origen’s exegesis seems strained and far-fetched to a modern reader, because he reads into the text things that are simply not there. But Origen was not asking the reader to “believe” his conclusions. Like any philosophical theory, his insights made no sense unless the disciple undertook the same spiritual exercises as his master. His commentaries were a
miqra
. Readers had to take the next step for themselves, meditating on the text with the same intensity as Origen, until they too were “capable of receiving the principles of truth.”
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Without long hours of
theoria
(“contemplation”), Origen’s exegesis was both incomprehensible and incredible.

Origen’s method of reading scripture according to the literal, moral, and spiritual senses became standard throughout the Christian world. The monastic reformer John Cassian (360–435) introduced this type of exegesis to western Europe and added a fourth sense: the
anagogical
, which described the eschatological dimension of any given text. This fourfold method remained in place in the West until the Reformation. It was imparted to the laity by preachers in the pulpit and used by monks when they meditated on the biblical text. You began always with the literal reading but then progressed up the ladder of the moral, allegorical, and anagogical senses in a symbolic “ascent” from the physical to the spiritual levels of existence. Until the modern period, nobody thought of confining their attention to a literal reading of the plain sense of scripture. When Christians started to insist on the literal truth of every word of the Bible in the late nineteenth century, many would find that it was as alien, incredible, and paradoxical as Origen had described.

For the fathers of the Church, scripture was a “mystery” not because it taught a lot of incomprehensible doctrines, but because it directed the attention of Christians toward a hidden level of reality. Scripture was also a “mystery,” because exegesis was a spiritual process that, like any initiation, proceeded stage by stage until the final moment of illumination. You could not hope to understand it without undergoing this disciplined ascesis of heart and mind. Scripture
was not just a text but an “activity;” you did not merely read it— you had to
do it.
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Scholars and lay folk alike usually read it in a liturgical setting, which separated it from secular modes of thought. As we know from Paul’s letters, the early Christians had developed their own rituals. Baptism and the Eucharist (a reenactment of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples) were also “mysteries,” not because they could not be understood by natural reason but because they were initiations, during which the congregation were taught to look beneath the symbolic gestures to find the sacred kernel within and thus experience a “change of mind.”

In the lectures of Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem (c. 315–86), we have one of the earliest accounts of the way candidates were introduced to the rituals and doctrines of the church.
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In Cyril’s church, the ceremony of baptism took place in the small hours of Easter Sunday morning in the Basilica of the Resurrection. During the six weeks of Lent, converts had undergone an intensive period of preparation. They had to fast, attend vigils, pray, and receive instruction about the
kerygma
, the basic factual message of the gospel. They were not required to believe anything in advance. They would be instructed in the deeper truths of Christianity only after the initiation of baptism, because these dogmas would make sense only after the transformative experience of the ritual. As in any philosophical school, theory was secondary to the rites and spiritual exercises that had produced it. Like any
mythoi
, the doctrines of Christianity were only ever imparted in a ritualized setting to people who were properly prepared and were eager to be transformed by it.
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Like the insights of any initiation, the doctrines that were revealed at the end of the ritualized process would seem trivial or even absurd to outsiders. It was only
after
they had been through the transformative process that new Christians were asked to recite the “creed,” a proclamation not of “belief” but of commitment to the God that had become a reality in their lives as a result of this rite of passage.

Cyril’s lectures, therefore, were not metaphysical doctrinal explanations demanding credulous “belief” but
mystagogy;
this had been the technical term for the instruction that enabled
mystai
in the Greek Mysteries “to assimilate themselves with the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.” When the ceremony began, baptismal candidates
were lined up outside the church facing westward, in the direction of Egypt, the realm of sunset and death. As a first step in their reenactment of the Israelites’ liberation from slavery, they renounced Satan. They were then “turned around” in a “conversion” toward the east—to the dawn, new life, and the pristine innocence of Eden. Processing into the church, they discarded their clothes, symbolically shedding their old selves, so that they stood naked, like Adam and Eve before the fall. Each
mystes
was then plunged three times into the waters of the baptismal pool. This was their crossing of the Sea and their symbolic immersion in the death of Christ, whose tomb stood only a few yards away. Each time they were pulled underwater, the bishop asked them: Do you have
pistis
in the Father—in the Son—and in the Holy Spirit? And each time, the
mystes
cried,
“Pisteuo!”:
“I give him my heart, my loyalty and my commitment!” When they emerged from the pool, they had themselves become
christoi
(“anointed ones”).
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They were clothed in white garments, symbolizing their new identity, received the Eucharist for the first time, and, like Christ at his own baptism, were ritually adopted as “sons of God.” In the Latin-speaking West, neophytes would cry
“Credo!”
when they were immersed in the water. This was not an intellectual assent to obligatory doctrines; much of the
dogma
would not be imparted to them until the following week. The
mystai
were not simply stating their “belief” in a set of empirically unproven propositions. The cry
“Pisteuo!”
or
“Credo!”
was more like “I will!” in the marriage service.