Despite these disagreements, Jesus and his followers evidently continued to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem and to observe Jewish law generally. Jesus’s only problem was the claim made on his behalf — probably not by himself personally — that he was the Jewish Messiah. This is what brought Jesus into conflict with both the Jewish authorities of the day and, more importantly, with their Roman overlords. And it was this that led to his execution at the hands of the Romans by the normal Roman method of execution, crucifixion.
“Messiah”
The belief in a Messiah is not mentioned anywhere in the Five Books of Moses but is a major theme in the Prophets, and particularly in the Book of Isaiah. One key verse in Isaiah predicts that a descendant of King David will gather together the Jews from exile, destroy their enemies and reunite them in their ancestral land.232 Although the word “messiah” is not used here, this is a portrayal of what was later referred to as the messiah. The messiah was to be as much a political as a religious leader. The word “messiah” (Hebrew: mashiach) means “the anointed one”, as anointing with oil was the way kings were consecrated in Biblical times. (The British coronation ceremony still combines anointing with crowning, but in ancient Israel there was no crowning, only anointing.) And the Greek equivalent of “messiah” was “christos”, or, in English, “Christ”.
“What is Truth?”
Why should a convert choose Christianity in preference to one of the many other cults that existed at the time? The key lies in the claim of Christianity to embody “the truth” coupled with the promise of “salvation” to its adherents. This is particularly stressed in John’s Gospel, where the word “truth” occurs twenty times. It is here that Jesus is quoted as claiming: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me.”233 And it is also in this Gospel that we find the famous (and probably fictitious) exchange between Jesus and Pontius Pilate. When Pilate asks Jesus whether he claims to be the King of the Jews (i.e. the Messiah), Jesus ducks the question and then adds: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” Pilate’s mocking retort is: “What is truth?”234
As a Roman and therefore an adherent of the Roman civic or state religion — a communal religion — Pontius Pilate would have been bemused by the boast of a religion or cult which claimed to embody “the truth”. Communal religions did not make this kind of claim. The truth of what? As communal religions do not really have a creed, there is nothing in which “the truth” could repose. Even Judaism, which was unusual in being a monotheistic communal religion, did not believe that the Jewish God was the only god, only that he was superior to the gods of all other nations because he was the Creator of the universe. The Ten Commandments do not say, “I am the only god.” Instead the injunction is: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This is a clear recognition that there are other gods — namely the gods of other peoples and nations — but the Jews are enjoined to worship their own national god in preference to any other gods. Even at the time of the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the prophet Micah writes, “For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.”235 Judaism has never claimed to be the only “true” religion. (But see Chapter 5 for a discussion of a recent dispute over this among British Jews.)
Christianity, however, did and does make this claim for itself, and in so doing sowed the seeds of two opposite developments. The belief that Christianity alone had a lock on Truth, which gave believers the key to salvation and eternal life, was very attractive to prospective converts. It gave Christians a sense of superiority over non-believers but at the same time made them intolerant of non-believers; and, as Christian doctrine developed and became more and more refined, so each Christian denomination became intolerant not only of non-Christians but also of other “heretical” Christians who did not share the “true” faith. As a result, the history of Christianity has been punctuated by persecutions, schisms and even massacres and religious wars. Some of these — like the Northern Ireland “sectarian conflict” — were activated by ethnic, national or class enmities that predated or underlay the religious differences and were merely expressed in religious terms. But the fact of their being so expressed only tended to exacerbate the conflict by cloaking it in moral terms.
Could Christianity have combined its claim to have a lock on “the truth” with toleration for those who accepted “false” beliefs? Most branches of Christianity in the West are now much more tolerant than ever before. In some cases, such as the Church of England, both clergy and laity are split on moral and ethical values like the role of women in the Church, the whole question of homosexuality and even on the truth of the creed, so that the Church itself has accepted a degree of moral relativity and could not therefore easily condemn moral relativity outside its ranks.
The Roman Catholic Church, by contrast, rejects moral relativism. In 2005 the future Pope Benedict XVI condemned the drift “towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires”.236 What he offered instead was: “Having a clear Faith, based on the Creed of the Church.” However, even the Catholic Church has become more tolerant of other religions and other denominations, though the difficulty it finds in doing so is reflected in this definition of “religious toleration” in the Catholic Encyclopedia:
By religious toleration is understood the magnanimous indulgence which one shows towards a religion other than his own, accompanied by the moral determination to leave it and its adherents unmolested in private and public, although internally one views it with complete disapproval as a ‘false faith’.
This extract is a good illustration of the difficulty of reconciling toleration with the claim to have a monopoly of the truth. But, what if Christianity’s claims are actually true? Would intolerance of dissent then be more acceptable? Not at all, but it may at least be more understandable.
So, our next task is to test some of the main claims of fact put forward by Christianity:
Jesus’s claimed birth in Bethlehem;
Jesus’s claimed descent from King David; and
Jesus’s claimed virgin birth.
As we shall see, none of these claims will stand up to scrutiny. But why were they made in the first place? The reason is simply that for Paul to win converts to the worship of an executed leader of a small Jewish sect it was necessary to portray the deceased object of worship in the most flattering light possible. Hence the claim that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, a claim which was obviously originally intended to attract Jewish adherents to the movement but which turned out to be much more successful in attracting Gentile converts, who would have been less critical of such a claim and much more likely to accept the stories of royal descent, virgin birth and miraculous signs and wonders.
The Birth of a Myth
Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem?
Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Or was he? It is one of the best known “facts” of Christianity, on the strength of which the town of Bethlehem has developed a thriving tourist trade. The reason for the claim that Jesus was born in Bethlehem is simply to tie in with the famous prediction of the prophet Micah that Bethlehem would be the birthplace of the Messiah (though the word “Messiah” is not used here), whose reign would usher in a time of peace between nations, in the famous words, “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” But even then each nation will still worship its own gods: “For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.”237 A parallel passage in Isaiah identifies the Messiah (again without using that word) as “a shoot out of the stock of Jesse”,238 who we know from the Book of Samuel was from Bethlehem and was the father of King David.239 Pulling the threads together, what we get is a require
ment that the Messiah be born in Bethlehem and a descendant of the royal house of David. If Jesus was the Messiah he had to qualify under both these heads.
But was Jesus really born in Bethlehem? Even the writers of the Christian scriptures disagree among themselves. Matthew and Luke both say yes, while John240 and Mark241 give the impression of never even having heard of Jesus’s supposed Bethlehem birth but assume that his birthplace was Nazareth, a small town in the northern region of Galilee, at the opposite end of the country from Bethlehem.
But even the accounts of Matthew and Luke do not really agree. Luke is well aware that Jesus was associated in the minds of his contemporaries with Nazareth, not Bethlehem, so he feels obliged to explain to his readers how it was that this Galilean happened to be born so far from home.
We today are much more accustomed to the idea of babies being born far from home than was the case then. Nowadays we even hear of births taking place in taxi-cabs or on board aeroplanes in mid-air between continents. But the period we are concerned with was one when travel was slow, troublesome and dangerous and when most people spent their whole lives in one little village without venturing more than a few miles in any direction from birth to death.
This is why Luke clearly finds it so necessary to offer us an explanation of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. And what is his explanation? It is the familiar story about the Roman census. An imperial decree was issued, says Luke, which required that everyone return “every one to his own city”.242 In the case of Joseph and Mary, this meant that they had to travel all the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem, which was Joseph’s “own city”.
On the face of it this sounds convincing enough. There is nothing like a little detail to win the confidence of an audience! Further investigation, however, reveals that the whole story is bogus.
What, after all, is a census? We today of course live in a much more numerate age than has ever existed before, and we are forever counting, measuring, calculating and checking every conceivable thing, sometimes (or so it would appear) for no reason other than to exercise our numerate skills! In most modern states a census is taken every few years, and all it is is a head count, to see how big the population is. But, despite the seeming meaninglessness of it, it has an eminently practical purpose. The object is not only to see whether the population as a whole has grown or declined but also, among many other things, whether there has been a shift of population from some regions to others. In other words, a census is a very practical exercise. What interests the census-taker is where people are, not where they once were or where their ancestors may happen to have come from.
The Roman government, being essentially made up of down-to-earth, practical administrators, was likewise not interested in figures for their own sake. The Roman census in fact had a specific practical purpose: taxation. The government wanted to know how many people there were in each locality so as to be able to calculate the tax due from each. And where would Joseph have paid his taxes? Not in Bethlehem, even if his family had originally come from there, but in Nazareth, where, as even Luke is quite happy to admit, he was actually resident. Seen in the light of history, therefore, nothing could be less in keeping with the true nature and purpose of a Roman census than a move from a person’s actual place of residence to some remote supposed birthplace or ancestral home town.
One little snag, though, is that the Roman census would not have affected Nazareth in any case, as Galilee was not under direct Roman rule but had its own ruler, the “tetrarch” Herod Antipas, son of King Herod.
But that is not the only problem connected with the census. Luke is obviously very anxious for us to accept his story about Jesus being born in Bethlehem, so he gives us a lot of detail in explaining it. He actually goes so far as to specify the name of the Roman governor under whom the census was held: Cyrenius. There certainly was a governor of that name (or Quirinius, to put it in its proper Latin form) and, what is more, he is known from Roman sources to have held a census. But his mention by Luke in connection with the birth of Jesus creates more problems than it solves. Above all, there is a problem of date. Quirinius certainly conducted a census — but at a time when Jesus would already have been ten years old! As it happens, Quirinius’s census can be precisely dated by means of the very detailed account given by the historian Josephus.243 According to him Quirinius was sent to conduct his census shortly after Judea had been annexed by Rome, which occurred in the year 6 or 7 CE. This census was obviously intended to be an initial “stock-taking” now that Judea was to be governed directly by Roman officials.
Some Christian commentators have cheerfully admitted that Luke’s dating of the census is a decade out and have simply left it at that. But most Christian writers on the subject have recognised that if they make this apparently trivial admission of error on Luke’s part, the whole story of Jesus’s Bethlehem birth falls to the ground. This has led to some desperate attempts to justify Luke’s account of the census.
Aided by an inscription describing an unnamed Roman military official, apologists have rushed to suggest that perhaps Quirinius had had an earlier — and totally unrecorded — tour of duty in the area and that the anonymous official was none other than himself in this role, conveniently dated to the time of Jesus’s birth.244 Besides the total lack of evidence for jumping to so improbable a conclusion, there is another little snag: the generally accepted date of Jesus’s birth was at a time when Rome had no jurisdiction either in Bethlehem or in Nazareth, so there could have been no census to coincide with Jesus’s birth.
This is because Jesus was born during the lifetime of King Herod “the Great”, who reigned from 37 to 4 BCE. How do we know that? We have it on the authority of Luke himself245 together with that of Matthew.246 The problem is that Herod died in 4 BCE, fully ten years before Quirinius’s census, and during Herod’s reign no Roman census could have been held in his territory, which included both Judea and Galilee, i.e. both Bethlehem and Nazareth.
It is clear from this that Luke has really tied himself in knots. On the one hand, he dates Jesus’s birth to 4BCE at the latest. On the other hand, he associates Jesus’s birth with an event that happened a decade later. Which story do we believe, and does it matter?
Yes, it does matter. It matters because acceptance of Jesus’s birth- date as falling in the reign of King Herod will finally put paid to the story of the Bethlehem birth, which as we have already seen is to be rejected on other grounds in any case.
One of the best known details of the Bethlehem story is the incident about the inn and the manger. The charming and pathetic scene painted for us by Luke (and, incidentally, by him alone of the Christian scripture writers) has so captivated generations of children and adults alike that no one has stopped to ask some basic questions. Such as: What were Joseph and Mary doing looking for accommodation at the inn in the first place? Hotels, inns, hostelries and the like were very few and far between in the ancient world as a whole. Travellers normally stayed with friends or relations. Why did Joseph and Mary not do so? After all, was this not Joseph’s original home town? That, according to Luke, was the whole reason for his journey to Bethlehem. Or are we to believe that there was not a single member of his family left there?
The more closely we examine the Bethlehem story, the more it disintegrates before our very eyes. To take another point: Why did Mary accompany Joseph to Bethlehem? Not only is it foolhardy for a woman in the last stages of pregnancy to undertake a long and perilous journey, but no one has ever claimed that Mary’s family came from Bethlehem, only Joseph’s. If Joseph and Mary had been husband and wife at the time, that would explain her accompanying him, but they were not married.
So far we have confined our discussion to Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. But what about Matthew, who also places the birth in Bethlehem?247 Unlike Luke, Matthew says not a word about any census, nor is there any mention of an inn or a manger. On the contrary, Matthew’s account gives us the impression that Bethlehem was the permanent home of Jo
seph and Mary, and Jesus is said to have been born in a “house”.248 When Nazareth is first mentioned, Matthew finds it necessary to give a special explanation of Joseph and Mary’s decision to settle in Galilee rather than in Judea,249 thus perpetuating the initial impression of Bethlehem rather than Nazareth as Joseph and Mary’s normal place of residence.
But, if this had really been the case, then why does Luke tie himself in knots in order to explain the couple’s residence in Bethlehem? Presumably because Luke knew that Bethlehem was not where they came from but felt impelled to get them there by hook or by crook in order to establish Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace. Matthew is equally concerned to set the birth in Bethlehem, but he adopts a different technique. Instead of inventing a story in order to transfer Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem, he slyly gives us the impression that they had been living in Bethlehem all the time! But his concern about a Bethlehem birth for Jesus comes out nevertheless. It comes out particularly in his (slightly distorted) quotation of the well-known passage from the prophet Micah250 predicting that it would be from Bethlehem that the Jewish Messiah would arise.251
Here we have the key to the whole problem of Jesus’s birth. Both Matthew and Luke want to prove to their readers that Jesus was the Messiah predicted in the Jewish prophetic writings. One of the essential prerequisites of the Messiah was that he be born in Bethlehem. Therefore, in order to “qualify” Jesus just had to be equipped with a Bethlehem birth. If we had only Matthew’s account of the birth and not Luke’s, we might well have believed that Jesus had indeed been born in Bethlehem. But Luke gives the game away by concocting an elaborate and demonstrably false story in order to “prove” the Bethlehem birth, thus unwittingly tarring the whole episode with the brush of fiction.
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