by Peter Watson
The wondrous virginity of Jesus’ birth also interferes with his genealogy. Jewish messianic tradition, as we have seen, deemed that Jesus should be descended from David, which rules out Mary as the vehicle because she, we are told, came from the tribe of Levi, not of Judah, as did David.87 But, according to the gospels, Jesus is not born of Joseph at all, but of the Holy Ghost. Therefore, there is no link to David.88 On the other hand, according to a very early version of the New Testament (the Sinaitic palimpsest, dated to200), ‘Jacob begat Joseph; Joseph to whom was espoused Mary the virgin, begat Jesus, who is called the Christ.’89 On this reading, can Jesus be regarded as divine at all? In the same way, in Luke, the twelve-year-old Jesus amazes the learned men in the Temple with his understanding. But when his worried parents come to find him, he rebukes them: ‘Wist ye not that I must be in my father’s house?’ The gospel continues: ‘They understood not the saying which he spake unto them.’ In other words, they appear unaware of his divine mission. How can that be when Mary has experienced such a miraculous birth? These inconsistencies, and the silence of other New Testament books on the subject, have led many scholars to agree with Vermes, that this is a later addition. But how can such an idea have arisen? There is nothing in Jewish tradition to suggest it. In the Hebrew Bible several of the wives of the patriarchs were sterile women whose wombs, ‘closed by God’, were later ‘opened’. This was divine intervention, ‘but it never resulted in divine impregnation’.90 One possibility is the prophecy of Isaiah (7:14), discussed in Chapter 5, which reads: ‘The Lord himself shall give you a sign; a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel’ (a name which means ‘God be with us’). But Isaiah is not suggesting anything supernatural here: the Hebrew word he used, almah, means ‘young woman’, who may or may not be a virgin. When this was translated into Greek, however, in the Septuagint, the word used, (parthenos), does mean ‘virgin’, and the passage read: ‘the virgin shall be with child and thou [the husband] shall call his name Immanuel’.91
In strong contrast with Jewish tradition, the pagan world contained many stories where important figures were virgin-born. In Asia Minor, Nana, the mother of Attis, was a virgin who conceived ‘by putting a ripe almond or pomegranate in her bosom’. Then there is Hera who went far away ‘from Zeus and men’ to conceive and bear Typhon.92 Similar legends existed in China but the closest parallel was the Mexican deity, Quetzalcoatl, who was born of a ‘pure virgin’ and was called ‘the Queen of Heaven’. In her case too, an ambassador from heaven announced to her that it was the will of god she could conceive a son ‘without connection with men’. The anthropologist J. G. Frazer believed these stories were very primitive, deriving their force from a time when early man had yet to understand the male role in conception.93 The writings of Philo of Alexandria (born about 20 BC, and therefore both contemporaneous with Jesus and earlier than the gospels) shows that ideas of virgin birth were common in the pagan world around the time that Christ lived.94 And of course, Christmas itself eventually settled on the day that many pagan religions celebrated the birth of the sun god, because this was the winter solstice, when the days began to lengthen. Here, again, is J. G. Frazer: ‘The pagans in Syria and Egypt represented the new-born sun by the image of an infant which on the winter solstice was exhibited to worshippers, who were told: “Behold the virgin has brought forth”.’95
The fact that Jesus was a Galilean also takes us into difficult territory. For Galilee was both socially and politically different from Judaea. It was primarily a rural area, settled by peasants but it was rich from the export of olive oil. The larger cities were Hellenised and it had become Jewish only fairly recently. In the eighth century BC, for example, Isaiah had referred to ‘The district (gelil) of the Gentiles’.96 Galilee was also home to what we would today call terrorists–Ezekias, executed in about 47 BC, and his son Judas who, with Zadok, a Pharisee, founded the Zealots, a politico-religious party, who advocated paying no taxes and recognised no foreign masters. It was descendants of Judas who led the revolt at Masada, a fortress on top of a 1,300-foot high rock on the edge of the Judaean desert, where 960 ‘insurgents and refugees’ were killed or committed mass suicide rather than surrender.97 Galileans had a pronounced rural accent (the Bible comments on this) and so Jesus may have been seen as a revolutionary, whether he was or not. We must also remember that the Aramaic word for carpenter or craftsman (naggar) also stands for ‘scholar’ or ‘learned man’. This might well account for the respect Jesus was held in from the start (and for the fact that he appears never to have had a job).98 On this account, was he seen as the eloquent mouthpiece for a Galilean revolutionary party?99
Contradiction and inconsistency also surround Jesus’ trial and Crucifixion, which throws yet more doubt on his identity and the nature of his beliefs. Christopher Rowland puts the issue plainly: Jesus was crucified by the Romans–why and what for? Specifically, why was he not punished by the Jews? Was his crime political, rather than religious, or political and religious (in the Palestine of the day it was often hard to distinguish the two). Jesus repeatedly espoused non-violent methods, which mean he could in no way be identified with the Zealots; on the other hand, his continual advocacy, that the kingdom of God was ‘at hand’, could easily have been seen as a political statement.
The first inconsistency concerns Jesus’ reception in Jerusalem. We are told that he was received ‘triumphantly’ by ‘the multitude’ and that the priests, who led this multitude, were unanimous in their reception. Within days, however, he is on trial, with the priests clamouring for his death. All four gospels agree that Jesus was first examined by the Jewish religious establishment before being handed over to Pilate, governor of Judaea. The first meeting takes place at the house of the high priest, Caiaphas, in the evening.100 With all the other scribes and elders gathered, Caiaphas asks Jesus if he really does claim to be the Messiah and ‘Jesus replies with words that the high priest deems to be blasphemous’.101 What can this reply have been? Under Jewish law blasphemy was a capital crime but it was not blasphemous to claim to be the Messiah–Simon bar Cochba claimed to be the Messiah a hundred years after Jesus’ death and was even accepted as such by certain prominent Jews.102 The inconsistencies don’t end there. After the meeting with Caiaphas, Jesus was passed on to Pilate. Yet Jewish law prevented a capital prosecution and execution at the time of the Sabbath, or festivals, as this was, and other laws prevented trials and executions on the same day, or at night. Finally, the penalty for blasphemy was stoning to death, not crucifixion.
The point is that none of this make any sense at all, in the context of the times, if Jesus’ crime(s) was or were essentially religious.103 But if his crimes were political, why is Pilate reported to have said, ‘I find no fault in this man.’ Other sources confirm that Pilate was ‘constantly on the alert against invasion or uprising’. The Jews actually go so far, before Pilate, of accusing Jesus of fomenting revolution. ‘We found this man perverting our nation and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar and saying that he himself is Christ the king.’ Yet none of Jesus’ followers were arrested with him, which would surely have happened had he been at the head of a political group, and Pilate hands him back to the Jews, to carry out what is a Roman execution. In some of the gospels there is no formal judgement by Pilate, and no formal sentence–he just lets the Jews have their way.104 Nor is the Crucifixion any clearer in its meaning. There is for example no known case of a Roman governor releasing a prisoner (such as Barabbas) on demand.105 And in fact this episode may be both more and less than it seems. Barabbas actually means ‘son of the father’ (Bar Abba) and we now know that in some early copies of Matthew, Barabbas’ name is given as Jesus Barabbas.106 Finally, at the Crucifixion itself, we are told that the sun darkened and the earth shook. Is this supposed to be a real or a metaphorical event? There is no independent corroboration of this: Pliny the Elder (c. AD 23–79) devoted an entire chapter of his Natural History to eclipses and makes no mention of an
ything that would fit with the Crucifixion.107
The inconsistencies of the resurrection are even more glaring, though in the first place we should remind ourselves that we have no eyewitnesses for these events. This is true despite the fact that the earliest mention of who was present at this remarkable set of episodes is given by Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, written in the mid-50s, before the gospels. Regarding the discovery of the empty tomb, Matthew says the women came to look at it, whereas in Mark they had looked at it before and now returned with spices to embalm the body. John is different again: the body had been embalmed by Nicodemus. In three of the gospels the stone was already rolled back, but in Matthew an angel rolled it back in the presence of the women.108 In Matthew the risen Jesus appears to the disciples in Galilee, whereas in Luke the episode takes place in Jerusalem.
In his first epistle to the Corinthians, composed in the mid-50s, well before the written gospels, though not necessarily before a gospel tradition was circulating orally, Paul gives a list of witnesses to the resurrection and the important observation to be made is that Paul, although he expected to live to see the last days, fails to mention the empty tomb.109 Possibly more important, the language he uses to describe the appearance of the resurrected Christ to the disciples, ophthe, is the same as he used to describe his own vision on the road to Damascus. In other words, it appears that for Paul the resurrection was not a physical thing, ‘not the return to life of dead flesh and blood’, but rather a spiritual transformation, a different form of understanding.110
There are arguments against this interpretation. For example, all the witnesses to the empty tomb were women and although there were wealthy women in Judaea, and despite the fact that women are heroines in contemporary literature, in general they had such a low status at that time that if someone were going to invent evidence they would surely not have chosen women. In the same vein, all the conversations which the risen Jesus has with those he meets are unremarkable, ordinary, no different from those he had before the Crucifixion. Again, had people invented these encounters then, given the singular nature of the phenomenon, the meetings would surely have been embellished to make them more significant.111
It is perfectly possible that Jesus was both a religious and a political threat–the two were by no means incompatible. If Jesus did call himself the Messiah, or even if he allowed his followers to look upon him in that way, he was automatically a political threat because of the Jewish conception of the Messiah as military hero who would lead the Jews to revolt against Rome. He was a religious threat because the Sadducees would be undone by someone whose conception of Judaism was so at odds with theirs. But this still does not explain the inconsistencies.
The very latest Jesus scholarship runs as follows: despite the differences discussed above, the striking similarities that remain in Matthew, Mark and Luke stem from the fact that Matthew and Luke each had a copy of Mark when they were composing their gospels. More, if you take out Mark from Matthew and Luke, you still have a lot of similar material, ‘including vast sections that are nearly word-for-word.’112 Nineteenth-century German scholars called this Q, for Quelle, or ‘source’. Together with the find, in 1945, at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, of the Gospel of Thomas, which scholars knew about but thought had vanished, this put a fresh light on the New Testament. The two most eye-catching and controversial views that have emerged from these discoveries are, first, Burton Mack’s, that Jesus was ‘a historical footnote’, ‘a marginal personality who, through whatever series of accidents, was turned into a god’, and Paula Fredericksen’s, that ‘Jesus was a Jewish apocalypticist who expected a cataclysmic intervention of God into history…and was devastatingly wrong. Christianity, then, amounts to a series of attempts to deal with this staggering error, most notably the doctrine of the Second Coming.’113 Both of these give Jesus a much-reduced status but still consider him to have been a historical figure.114
Whatever Christianity means today, and we shall be following the ways in which its message changed in later chapters, the main idea of Jesus, as reflected in the New Testament, is relatively simple. It was that ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’. The actual phrase itself was not common in Hebrew scriptures but, as we have seen, the idea of a Messiah had grown more popular among the Israelites and, in the hundred or so years before Jesus’ birth, had changed its meaning, from ‘king’ to ‘redeemer’. It is important to add, however, that Jesus never once called himself the Messiah.115
Johannes Weiss, the German New Testament scholar, argued in Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, published in English in 1971, that this dominant idea of Jesus could be broken down into four elements: that the messianic time was imminent; that, once God had established the kingdom, judgement and rule would be transferred to Jesus; that initially Jesus hoped he would live to see the kingdom established, but subsequently he realised his death would be required. Even then, however, he believed that the kingdom would be established in the lifetime of the generation that had rejected him, when he would return ‘upon the clouds of heaven’ and the land of Palestine would form the centre of the new kingdom. In other words, Jesus was not speaking just about spiritual renewal, but he envisaged fundamental change in the physical reality of the world, and he expected it soon.116 Around the edges of this dominant idea, Jesus often took a more relaxed approach to the details of Jewish law (observance of the Sabbath, dietary restrictions), emphasising God’s mercy rather than his punitive justice, and insisting on inner conviction rather than outward observance of ritual. His message was, after all, directed at Jews. He never envisaged a new religious system: ‘I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to them alone.’117 He even turned away Gentiles who sought him out.118 This is a simple but all-important idea that has got lost in history.
After Jesus’ resurrection, and his ascension into heaven, his followers continued to worship in the Temple, expecting his return at any moment and with it their own redemption. To this end, they tried to prepare Israel, urging on their fellow Jews the changes Jesus had proposed. But this, of course, conflicted with the authority of the traditional priests and scribes and, the further they spread from Jerusalem, the more this resistance deepened, among Jews who had no direct, first-hand experience of Jesus. In turn, this caused a major shift in Christianity (a term first coined among the Jewish-Christian community at Antioch): Gentiles were less resistant to the message of the apostles, because their traditional beliefs were less threatened. So that by the end of the first century, the early churches (rather than synagogues) had taken on a greater distance from Judaism than had been the case in the immediate aftermath of the Crucifixion. They repudiated the Torah, viewed the destruction of the Temple, by the Romans in 66, with some satisfaction and transferred the New Testament promises, originally aimed at Israel, to themselves.119 This is how Christianity as we know it started, as first a form of Judaism, steadily separating out (thanks mainly to Paul), as it moved away from Jerusalem.
Paul, a near contemporary of Jesus, expected the Parousia (or Second Coming) in his lifetime. Mark saw the destruction of the Temple as the beginning of the end, but by the time Matthew and Luke were written the Second Coming was already seen as some way off. Even so, the early Christians followed in the Jewish tradition of assuming a special place for themselves theologically: they rejected the Hellenistic idea, not just of polytheism but of a variegated approach to understanding the world, and insisted instead on historical particularity–that the divine had manifested itself uniquely via a specific individual at a specific time. Their concern with this particular event, and particular place, is–however accidental–one of the most momentous ideas yet conceived.
8
Alexandria, Occident and Orient
in the Year 0
To Chapter 8 Notes and References
There was, of course, no year 0, and for several reasons. One is that the zero had not yet been invented: that happened in India, probably in the seventh centur
y AD. Another is that many people around the world, then as now, were not Christians, and conceived time in completely different ways. A third reason is that the conventional chronology, used for dating events in the West over several centuries–AD, for Anno Domini, the year of Our Lord, and BC, before Christ–was not introduced until the sixth century. Jesus, as we have seen, never intended to start a new religion, and so people of his day, even if they had heard of him, never imagined that a new era was beginning. Use of the AD sequence did not in fact become widespread until the eighth century, when it was employed by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, and the BC system, though referred to by Bede, did not come into general use until the latter half of the seventeenth century.1 However, considering a hypothetical ‘Year 0’ allows us to look at ancient notions of time, and to see what other ideas were current in the world in the era when Jesus is supposed to have lived.