There were times when the relationship between them was warm. The Jews respected Greek science. In return, Aristotle’s disciple Theophrastus spoke of the Jews as a nation of philosophers. But there were also tensions, especially when Israel came under Seleucid rule in the second century BCE. One Seleucid ruler, Antiochus IV, attempted to Hellenise the Jews, banning the public practice of Judaism and erecting a statue of Zeus in the precincts of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jews successfully fought a war of freedom that we still recall on the festival of Hanukkah. A century later, however, Pompey invaded Israel, conquered Jerusalem, and the land came under Roman rule.4
By then and throughout the remaining Second Temple period the Jewish people was hopelessly factionalised. Some favoured accommodation with Rome, others active rebellion. Some believed in politics as usual, others were convinced that an apocalypse was in the making that would lead to the messianic age and ‘the kingdom of heaven’, when idolatry would cease, and Israel would recover its sovereignty and be free to pursue its vocation as a holy nation.
There was also a major cultural struggle. Many Jews in Israel and the Diaspora had become deeply Hellenised. Meanwhile, as we know from Philo, Josephus and other contemporary observers, many Gentiles in the Hellenistic world had adopted at least some Jewish practices and become half-converts, ‘God-fearers’, Jewish sympathisers if not full Jews. In the opposite direction there were Jews – the rabbis – who believed the faith would only survive by turning inwards and strengthening the key institutions of the Jewish home, the synagogue and the House of Study. It was against this complex and fraught backdrop that Christianity was born.
Jesus was a Jew. He lived in the land of Israel, mainly in the Galilee area, in and among Jews. He spoke to them as a Jew. He read the Bible and almost certainly prayed in Hebrew. Most of his words, phrases, concepts and ideas are familiar to anyone acquainted with the rabbinic Judaism of the time.
Jesus spoke Aramaic, the language of Jews living in Israel at the time. This was the language of the school and the marketplace, into which the Bible was orally translated, line by line, when read in the synagogue, for the benefit of those who did not understand the original. Later it would become the language of the Talmud.
Whenever we hear the direct, untranslated speech of Jesus in the Gospels, he is speaking Aramaic. When he brings back a dead girl to life, he says Talita kum, the Aramaic for ‘Little girl, get up.’ When he prays to God in Mark 14:36, he uses the word Abba, Aramaic for ‘Father’. During the Sermon on the Mount he criticises those who call other people Raca, an Aramaic insult meaning ‘empty one’. Most famously, at the crucifixion he cries out, in its standard Aramaic translation, the line from Psalm 22, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ The Aramaic, Eli, Eli lama sabachtani, is very close to the Hebrew, Eli, Eli lama azavtani.
Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew. But every book of the New Testament was written in Greek. That is the extraordinary fact. Even the Hebrew Bible was known to Christians for centuries in Greek only, in the form of the Septuagint, the translation into koine Greek made in Ptolemaic Egypt in the third century BCE. The New Testament is, through and through, a Greek document, not a Hebrew or Aramaic one. The testimony of perhaps the greatest Christian biblical scholar of our time, James Barr, is particularly striking. Arguing that the New Testament ‘is much more Greek in its terms, its conceptuality, and its thinking than main trends of modern biblical theology have tended to allow’, he continues:
My own experience makes this to me undeniable. If one has spent most of one’s life, as I have, working on Hebrew and other Semitic-language texts, and then returns after some absence to a closer study of the New Testament, the impression of the essentially Greek character of the latter is overwhelming … The attempt, at one time popular and influential, to argue that, though the words might be Greek, the thought processes were fundamentally Hebraic, was a conspicuous failure.5
Barr’s statement, made in the course of his 1991 Gifford Lectures, is all the more striking since it was he who, thirty years earlier, in his influential The Semantics of Biblical Language, argued against contrasting Greek and Hebrew modes of thought in terms of the structure of their respective languages.
The reasons for this strange turn of events are well known. In the first decades after Jesus’ death the Church might have gone in either of two directions. It might have become a Jewish sect, the Jerusalem church, under Jesus’ brother James. In the event, however, it was Paul who found a ready audience among the Hellenistic Gentiles of the Mediterranean, especially those who had already shown an interest in elements of Jewish practice and faith. It was the Greek- not the Hebrew-and-Aramaic–speaking population that proved to be the fertile soil in which Christianity took root and grew.
We do not know whether Jesus spoke or understood Greek. It is likely that he knew a few words, the kind you might use in the market or the street, but there is no evidence that he thought, taught or prayed in Greek, and the balance of probability is overwhelmingly against it. It is an open question whether he would have understood the New Testament. We have here, in other words, a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.
Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence. But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages. They represented antithetical civilisations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. In terms of the last chapter, Greek philosophy and science – the Greece of Thales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle – was a predominantly left-brain culture, the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one. At precisely the time Greek came to be written left-to-right and Athens became a literate rather than an oral culture, it became the birthplace of science and philosophy, the two supremely left-brain, conceptual, analytical ways of thinking.
Western civilisation was born in the synthesis between Athens and Jerusalem brought about by Pauline Christianity and the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312, turning a small and often persecuted sect into the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was an astonishing, improbable event and it eventually transformed the world. Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel. But from the outset it contained a hairline fracture that would not become a structural weakness until the seventeenth century. It consisted in this, that though Christians encountered philosophy, science and art in the original Greek, they experienced the religion of their founder in translation.
Greek is a language into which the personal religious background of Jesus does not go. It was the natural language of thought of Paul, the writers of the Gospels, the authors of the other books of the New Testament, the early Church Fathers and the first Christian theologians. It was their genius that shaped a new religious movement that was to prove the most successful in the entire history of the spiritual quest of humankind. But it contained one assumption that would eventually be challenged from the seventeenth century until today, namely that science and philosophy on the one hand, and religion on the other, belong to the same universe of discourse.
They may. But they may not. It could be that Greek science and philosophy and the Judaic experience of God are two different languages that – like the left- and right-brain modes of thinking we encountered in the last chapter – only imperfectly translate into one another. Recognising this now might leave science freer to be science, and religion to be religion, without either challenging the integrity of the other.6
The Christianity that eventually emerged from the tradition of Paul, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas had strong Judaic elements. It spoke of faith, hope, charity, righteousness, love, forgiveness, the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of life. It valued humility and compassion. It spoke of a God who loves his creatures. But it also contained strands that were undeniably Greek and in striking contrast
with the way Jews read the Hebrew Bible. The following are some of them.
The first and most obvious is universality. Judaism is a principled and unusual combination of universality and particularity: the universality of God, and the particularity of the ways in which we relate to God. The God of Israel is the God of all humanity, but the religion of Israel is not, and is not intended to be, the religion of all humanity. You do not have to be part of the Sinai covenant, or even the covenant of Abraham, to reach heaven and achieve salvation.
Pauline Christianity rejected this. The upside of this is its inclusivity, expressed most famously in Paul’s striking statement, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female’ (Galatians 3:28). The downside is its denial of any other route to salvation. Extra ecclesiam non est salus: ‘Outside the Church there is no salvation.’ Universality is supremely characteristic of Greek thought in the classic age between the sixth and third pre-Christian centuries (though of course it was not applied in their religious understanding). Above all it is the legacy of Plato, who utterly devalued particulars in favour of the universal form of things. For Plato truth is universal and eternal or it is not truth at all. In that sense, Paul and Plato are soulmates.
The second is dualism. To a far greater extent than Judaism, Christianity after Paul develops a series of dualisms, between body and soul, the physical and the spiritual, Earth and heaven, this life and the next, with the emphasis on the second of each pair. The body, says Paul in Romans, is recalcitrant. ‘What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do’ (Romans 7:15). There is nothing like this in Jewish literature. To be sure there is the ‘evil inclination’, but no suggestion that because of our embodied condition we are slaves to sin. The entire set of contrasts – soul as against body, the afterlife as against this life – is massively Greek with much debt to Plato and traces of Gnosticism. Paul’s occasionally ambivalent remarks about sexuality and marriage also have no counterpart in mainstream Judaism.
Third is the Pauline reinterpretation, one of the most radical in the history of religion, of the story of Adam and Eve and ‘the Fall’, and the consequent tragic view of the human condition. There is no such interpretation of the passage in the Hebrew Bible. According to Judaism we are not destined to sin. In the very next chapter, before Cain murders his brother Abel, God reminds him of his essential freedom: ‘Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you can dominate it’ (Genesis 4:7). The collective forgiveness of humankind occurs, in the Hebrew Bible, after the Flood. ‘Never again,’ says God, ‘will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood’ (Genesis 8:21).
The human tragedy as described by Paul is more Greek than Jewish, and as for the idea of inherited sin, it is already negated in the sixth pre-Christian century by both Jeremiah and Ezekiel.7 Of course, in Christianity, tragedy is avoided by salvation; but salvation in this sense, the existential deliverance of the human person from the grip of sin, does not exist in Judaism. We choose. Sometimes we choose wrongly. We atone (in biblical times through the Temple service, post-biblically by repentance) and God forgives.
Fourth is the potential for the separation, unknown in Judaism, between ‘faith’ and ‘works’. In Judaism the two go hand in hand. Faithfulness is a matter of how you behave, not what you believe. Believing and doing are part of a single continuum, and both are a measure of a living relationship characterised by loyalty. In general one of the great differences between classical Greek and Hebraic thought is the immense emphasis in the latter on the will. We are, in a Jewish view, what we choose to be, and it is in the realm of choice, decision and action that the religious drama takes place. The Greek view emphasises far more the role of fate and the futility of fighting against it. Under its influence Christianity became more a religion of acceptance than protest – the characteristic stance of the Hebrew prophets.
The fifth and most profound difference lies in the way the two traditions understood the key phrase in which God identifies himself to Moses at the burning bush. ‘Who are you?’ asks Moses. God replies, cryptically, Ehyeh asher ehyeh. This was translated into Greek as ego eimi ho on, and into Latin as ego sum qui sum, meaning ‘I am who I am’, or ‘I am he who is’. The early and medieval Christian theologians all understood the phrase to be speaking about ontology, the metaphysical nature of God’s existence. It meant that he was ‘Being-itself, timeless, immutable, incorporeal, understood as the subsisting act of all existing’. Augustine defines God as that which does not change and cannot change. Aquinas, continuing the same tradition, reads the Exodus formula as saying that God is ‘true being, that is being that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient, and the cause and principal of every creature’.8
But this is the God of Aristotle and the philosophers, not the God of Abraham and the prophets. Ehyeh asher ehyeh means none of these things. It means ‘I will be what, where, or how I will be’. The essential element of the phrase is the dimension omitted by all the early Christian translations, namely the future tense. God is defining himself as the Lord of history who is about to intervene in an unprecedented way to liberate a group of slaves from the mightiest empire of the ancient world and lead them on a journey towards liberty. Already in the eleventh century, reacting against the neo-Aristotelianism that he saw creeping into Judaism, Judah Halevi made the point that God introduces himself at the beginning of the Ten Commandments not as God who created heaven and Earth, but by saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’9
Far from being timeless and immutable, God in the Hebrew Bible is active, engaged, in constant dialogue with his people, calling, urging, warning, challenging and forgiving. When Malachi says in the name of God, ‘I the Lord do not change’ (Malachi 3:6), he is not speaking about his essence as pure being, the unmoved mover, but about his moral commitments. God keeps his promises even when his children break theirs. What does not change about God are the covenants he makes with Noah, Abraham and the Israelites at Sinai.
So remote is the God of pure being – the legacy of Plato and Aristotle – that the distance is bridged in Christianity by a figure that has no counterpart in Judaism, the Son of God, a person who is both human and divine. In Judaism we are all both human and divine, dust of the Earth yet breathing God’s breath and bearing God’s image. These are profoundly different theologies.
The unique synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem that became Christianity led to the discipline of theology and thus to the intellectual edifice of Western civilisation between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It was a wondrous achievement, a cathedral of the mind. It brought together the Judaic love of God and the Hellenistic love of nature and human reason. It led to philosophical proofs of the existence of God. There was the cosmological argument: the universe must have a cause that is not itself caused. Or the contingency of being must be rooted in necessary being. Or the moving stars must have an unmoved mover. There was the ontological argument: the most perfect being must necessarily exist since otherwise it would be imperfect. There was the argument from design. As Cicero put it, ‘When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?’10
There is natural law. Contemplation of nature tells us how to behave in such a way as to align ourselves with the order of the universe. It leads us to cultivate virtue, pursue justice and have concern for the common good. And there is natural theology. God’s purposes can be read in creation, for God wrote two books, one in words called the Bible, the other in works called the universe. So wrote Hugh of St Victor in the twelfth century, as did Francis Bacon in the seventeenth, ushering in the age of science.11
It was, to repeat, a wondrous creation – but it was as much Greek as Judai
c. The philosophical proofs for the existence of God derived ultimately from Plato and Aristotle. Natural law came from the Stoics. The idea that purposes are inherent in creation – that nature is teleological – was Aristotelian. It combined left-brain rationality with right-brain spirituality in a single, glorious, overarching structure. We may never see its like again.
The second story began for me in 1993 when I was privileged to receive an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University together with, among others, James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA. It gave me the opportunity of saying the ancient blessing, coined by Judaism’s sages some two thousand years ago and still to be found in all Jewish prayer books, thanking God for bestowing his wisdom on human beings. Essentially it is a blessing to be said on seeing a great scientist, although the word ‘scientist’ was not coined until many centuries later, and it reflects a time when religion and science were seen not as adversaries but as respected friends.
I thought hard about that blessing because it is so unexpected. The Talmud says it is to be said on seeing ‘one of the sages of the nations of the world’.12 The sages they were referring to were either Greek or Roman. Remember that the Greeks, under the Seleucid Antiochus IV, had banned the public practice of Judaism. Centuries later, the Romans had destroyed the Temple and razed Jerusalem. These were Israel’s enemies, politically, militarily, above all culturally and spiritually. The Greeks were polytheists. The Romans had a disturbing tendency to turn caesars into gods. For the sages to institute a blessing – a religious act of thanksgiving – over their scholars showed a remarkable open-mindedness to wisdom whatever its source. ‘Accept the truth, whoever says it,’ said Maimonides.13 There is religious dignity and integrity to science.
No less remarkable is the way in which the rabbis of that era recognised that when it came to science, their own views might simply be wrong. There is a talmudic passage – it reads somewhat quaintly nowadays – in which the rabbis are discussing the question of where the sun goes at night. First they give their own opinion, then they cite the Greek view, that of Ptolemy. They then conclude, ‘And their view seems more plausible than ours.’14That is the way the Talmud tells the story. They are right. We are wrong. End of discussion.
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning Page 7