Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches
Page 16
There is also some convergent evidence on this point from the Dead Sea Scrolls. I said a moment ago that the idea of messiah returning from the dead was not unprecedented. The Dead Sea Scrolls refer to a “teacher of righteousness” who is killed by his enemies but returns to fulfill the messianic task. Like the Quamranites, the first Jewish Christians organized themselves into a commune while awaiting the return of their “teacher of righteousness.”
The Acts of the Apostles states:
All that believed were together and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them among all, according as any man had need.… Neither was there any among them that lacked, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things sold and laid them down at the apostles’ feet.
It is of considerable interest that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain prescriptions for establishing communities of penitent Jews in the cities to be organized along the same communistic lines. This is additional evidence that the Quamran militants and the Jewish Christians were either responding in similar ways to similar conditions or were actually aspects or branches of one and the same military-messianic movement.
As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, the image of Jesus as the peaceful messiah was probably not perfected until after the fall of Jerusalem. During the interval between Jesus’ death and the writing of the first gospel, the groundwork for a cult of peaceful messianism was laid by Paul. But those for whom Jesus was primarily a Jewish military-messianic redeemer dominated the movement throughout the period of expanding guerrilla activity leading up to the confrontation of 68 A.D. The practical setting in which the gospels were written—gospels which depict a purely peaceful and universal messiah—was the aftermath of the unsuccessful Jewish war against Rome. A purely peaceful messiah became a practical necessity when the generals who had just defeated the Jewish messianic revolutionaries—Vespasian and Titus—became the rulers of the Roman Empire. Before that defeat, it had been a practical necessity for the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem to remain loyal to Judaism. After that defeat, the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem could no longer dominate the Christian communities in other parts of the empire, least of all those Christians who lived in Rome at the sufferance of Vespasian and Titus. In the aftermath of the unsuccessful messianic war, it quickly became a practical necessity for Christians to deny that their cult had arisen out of the Jewish belief in a messiah who was going to topple the Roman Empire.
The Jerusalem commune was led by a triumvirate called “the pillars” in the Acts of the Apostles, consisting of James, Peter, and John. Among these, James, identified by Paul as “the Lord’s Brother” (precise genealogical connection unknown), soon emerged as the preeminent figure. It was James who led the straggle against Paul’s attempt to obscure the Jewish military-messianic origins of the Jesus movement
Although Jerusalem remained the center of Christianity until 70 A.D., the new cult soon spread beyond Palestine to many of the communities of Jewish merchants, artisans, and scholars found in every major city and town of the Roman Empire. The overseas Jews learned about Jesus from missionaries who toured the foreign synagogues. Paul, the most important of these missionaries, was born Saul of Tarsus, a Greek-speaking Jew whose father had acquired Roman citizenship for himself and his family. Paul insisted that he had become an apostle of Jesus by the authority of revelation and without any direct contact with the original apostles in Jerusalem. In his letter to the Galatians, written sometime between 49 and 57 A.D., Paul said that he had been missionizing Arabia and Damascus for three years and had never talked to any of the original apostles. The letter states that at that time he visited briefly with Simon Peter and talked with James, “the Lord’s Brother.”
For the next fifteen years Paul was on the road again, traveling from city to city. His first converts were almost invariably Jews. This had to be the case because it was the Jews who were most familiar with the prophetic lineage that Paul claimed Jesus fulfilled. Even if Paul had not studied with rabbis, had not spoken Hebrew, and had not considered himself a Jew, he would still have found the Jews scattered throughout the eastern portion of the Roman Empire the people most likely to respond to the appeal of the Jesus cult. Not only were the Jews one of the largest groups of displaced persons in the empire, but they were among the most influential and up to 71 A.D. enjoyed many privileges which were denied to other ethnics. Paul had between three and six million Jews to proselytize outside of Palestine—more than twice as many as James had to proselytize within Palestine—and virtually every one of the foreign Jews lived in a city or town.
Paul made a special effort to recruit among non-Jews whenever he was rebuffed by an overseas Jewish community. But this in itself was no novelty. Attracted by the social and economic advantages which Jews enjoyed as a result of their long experience in cosmopolitan settings, there always had been a steady stream of converts to Judaism. Male converts were welcome as Jews as long as they were willing to obey the commandments and be circumcised. The greatest novelty associated with Paul’s proselytizing was not his messianic message, but his willingness to baptize non-Jews as Jewish Christians without bothering to have them circumcised or certified as Jews.
The Acts of the Apostles states that Paul returned to Jerusalem after a prolonged absence, and pleaded with James and the Jerusalem elders not to interfere with his efforts at converting non-Jews to Christianity. James’s verdict was that non-Jews could become Christians without submitting to circumcision provided they renounced idolatry, fornication, and meat that was strangled or bloody. But James and the Jerusalem communards insisted that uncircumcised Christians were inferior to Jewish Christians. Paul reports that when Simon Peter visited him in Antioch, all the Christians ate together. But with the arrival of a commission of inquiry sent out by James, Simon Peter immediately stopped eating with the uncircumcised Christians, “fearing them that were of the Circumcision”—that is, fearing that the Jewish Christian commissioners would tell James.
It was to Paul’s advantage, given his overseas constituency, to underplay the privileged role to be allocated to the children of Israel in the Holy Jewish Empire. It was also to his advantage to ignore the worldly military and political components in Jesus’ messianic mission. But Paul’s ecumenical innovations created a strategic problem that he was never able to solve. Inevitably it brought him into deeper conflict with James and the Jerusalem communards, since the survival of the Jerusalem Christians depended on their ability to maintain their standing as bona-fide Jewish patriots. In order to survive amid the various factions involved in the escalating war with Rome, it was essential that James continue to worship in the Jerusalem temple and that his followers maintain an image of devotion to Jewish law. Their faith in Jahweh’s covenant had been increased, not diminished, by their belief that Jesus would soon reappear.
Paul was accused of urging Jews in foreign cities to disregard the laws of Judaism and of treating Jew and non-Jew as if there were no difference between them—as if Jew and gentile were equally entitled to the blessings of the forthcoming messianic redemption. If such an interpretation of the Jesus cult were ever to spread to Jerusalem, James and his followers were doomed. In Brandon’s words: “From the Jewish point of view, such a presentation was not only theologically outrageous, it amounted to apostasy of the most shocking kind, involving both race and religion.”
The preserved evidence of Jesus’ reported actions and sayings provides no support for Paul’s attempt to scrap the distinction between Jew and non-Jew in the overseas communes. In the Gospel according to Mark, for example, a Syrian Greek woman falls at Jesus’ feet and begs him to drive out the devils from her daughter. Jesus refuses: “Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread and to cast it to the dogs.” The Syrian Greek woman argues back, saying: “The dogs under the table eat the childrens’ crumbs,” whereupon Jesus relents and cures the woman’s daughter. “Children�
� here can only mean “children of Israel” and “dogs” can only mean non-Jews, especially enemies like the Syrian Greeks. Incidents and sayings of this sort were preserved in Mark and the other gospels for the same reason that the other vengeful and ethnocentric sayings and actions could not be entirely expunged. There were lively oral traditions upon which the gospels were based. Too many eyewitnesses like James, Peter, and John were still active, eyewitnesses who insisted on the authenticity of the military-messianic and ethnocentric themes. Besides, Mark was Jewish by birth and therefore was probably never entirely free from some degree of ambivalence about the ethnic distinctions that had formerly been insisted upon by the founders of the Jerusalem mother “church.”
To protect the Jerusalem commune, James dispatched rival missionaries instructed to preserve the Judaic significance of Christianity; they were not above jeopardizing Pauls following by impugning his credentials. Paul was vulnerable to these attacks because he admitted that he had never seen Jesus except in a vision. Moreover, he continued to need the support of the foreign synagogues. So, in 59 A.D., despite forebodings and oracular warnings, Paul decided to return to Jerusalem and have it out with his accusers.
Paul appeared before James as an accused person appears before a judge. James admonished Paul by noting that there were thousands of Jews in Jerusalem who believed in Jesus, yet they were all “zealous of the law.” He then ordered Paul to demonstrate that he was a loyal Jew and that the charges against him were unfounded—to demonstrate “that thou walkest orderly and keepest the law.” He demanded that Paul submit to seven days of purificatory rites in the Jerusalem temple. Paul accepted these demands, proving: (1) James, the Lord’s Brother, was the supreme leader of Christendom at that time; (2) James and the Jewish Christians still worshiped in the temple—they had no separate “church”; (3) the Jewish Christians believed that Jesus would return to fulfill the Davidic covenant by making Jerusalem the center of the Holy Jewish Empire; (4) all baptized penitent believers in Jesus and Jahweh would be redeemed, but Jewish Christians would be redeemed more than the rest.
Paul’s attempt to reaffirm his loyalty to the Jewish national ideal was cut short, undoubtedly by treachery. A group of pilgrims from Asia recognized him, stirred up a mob, dragged him from the temple, and started to beat him to death. Only the timely intervention of the Roman captain of the guard saved Paul on that occasion. Brought to trial by the high priests, he again narrowly escaped death. More plots were laid against him, but he finally managed to escape from Palestine by invoking his Roman citizenship and demanding that he be tried by Romans, not by Jews. He was sent to Rome and kept under house arrest, but what happened to him afterwards is not definitely known. What probably happened to him is that he was martyred in 64 A.D., when the Emperor Nero decided to blame a huge fire in Rome—which his enemies said he himself had set to clear out the shums near his palace—on a convenient new bloodthirsty sect that had arisen among the Jews, members of which were “enemies of mankind.”
Too late for Paul, the outbreak of full-scale war in Palestine drastically altered the political context of his aborted mission. By 70 A.D. the Jewish Christian mother “church” in Jerusalem no longer held the upper hand over the overseas Christian communities. It ceased to be a significant force, if it can be said in any sense to have survived die fall of Jerusalem. The protracted revolution of 68–73 thoroughly embittered relationships between the overseas Jews and the Romans. Also, it catapulted the very persons responsible for the defeat of the Jews into control of the empire. In 71 A.D. Vespasian and his son Titus held a stupendous triumphal procession—commemorated on the Arch of Titus in Rome—during which Jewish prisoners and spoils were marched through the streets while the last zealot-bandit commander of Jerusalem, Simon ben Gioras, was strangled in the Forum. Vespasian thereafter dealt harshly with the Jews in the empire, restricting their liberties and diverting their temple tax to the treasury of Saturn. During the remainder of the first century A.D., anti-Semitism became an established feature of Roman life and letters; it was met with smoldering defiance, insurrection, and intensified repressions that led to the second Armageddon of Bar Kochva in 135 A.D.
From the stress placed by Mark upon the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem as a punishment for the killers of Jesus, Brandon infers that this gospel—the first to be composed and the model for the others—was written in Rome after the fall of Jerusalem. As Brandon says, it was probably written in direct response to the great victory celebration of 71 A.D.
The appropriate conditions for the spread of the cult of a peaceful messiah were at last present in full force. Jewish Christians now readily joined with gentile converts to convince the Romans that their messiah was different from the zealot-bandit messiahs who had caused the war and who were continuing to make trouble: Christians, unlike Jews, were harmless pacifists with no secular ambitions. The Christian Kingdom of God was not of this world; Christian salvation lay in eternal life beyond the grave; the Christian messiah had died to bring eternal life to all mankind; his teaching posed no threat to the Romans, only to the Jews; the Romans were absolved of any guilt in Jesus’ death; the Jews alone had killed him while Pontius Pilate stood by, helplessly unable to prevent it
The secret of the peaceful messiah lay on the battlefields and in the aftermath of two earthly Armageddons. The cult of the peaceful messiah as we know it would not have prospered had the course of battle gone against the “Sons of Darkness.”
The primary source of converts to this new religion—if not in number, certainly in influence—continued to be urban Jews scattered all over the eastern Mediterranean. Contrary to legend, Christianity made no headway at all among the great mass of peasants and slaves who constituted the bulk of the population of the empire. As the historian Salo W. Baron points out, paganus, the Latin word for “peasant,” became for the Christians a synonym for “heathen.” Christianity was eminently the religion of the displaced ethnic urbanités. “In cities where Jews had often amounted to one third of the population and more, this, so to speak, new variety of Judaism marched triumphantly ahead.”
Jews who remained Jews were far more the victims of Roman persecution than Jews who became Christians. The age of full-scale imperial persecution of Christians did not begin with Nero, but much later—after 150 A.D. By that time, because they were concentrated in the urban centers, had infiltrated the Roman upper class, maintained effective social welfare programs, and were building a fiscally independent, international corporation led by skilled administrators, the Christian churches had once again become a political threat to Roman law and order. They had become a “state within a state.”
I shall have to refrain from following out the chain of worldly events that eventually led to the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. But this much should be said: When the Emperor Constantine took that momentous initiative, Christianity was no longer the cult of the peaceful messiah. Constantine’s conversion took place in 311 A.D. as he led a small army across the Alps. Wearily approaching Rome he saw a vision of the cross standing above the sun, and on the cross he saw the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES—“By this sign you will conquer.” Jesus appeared to Constantine and directed him to emblazon his military standard with the cross. Under this strange new banner, Constantine’s soldiers went on to win a decisive victory. They regained the empire and thereby guaranteed that the cross of the peaceful messiah would preside over the deaths of untold millions of Christian soldiers and their enemies down to the present day.
Broomsticks and
Sabbats
JUST AS big men helped us to understand the practical significance of messiahs, now that we know something about messiahs we will be better able to understand the practical significance of witches. But once again I must warn you that the relationship won’t be obvious. A number of preliminary matters must be considered before the connection can be drawn.
It is estimated that five hundred thousand people were convicted of w
itchcraft and burned to death in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their crimes: a pact with the Devil; journeys through the air over vast distances mounted on broomsticks; unlawful assembly at sabbats; worship of the Devil; kissing the Devil under the tail; copulation with incubi, male devils equipped with ice-cold penises; copulation with succubi, female devils.
Other more mundane charges were often added: killing the neighbor’s cow; causing hailstorms; ruining the crops; stealing and eating babies. But many a witch was executed for no crime other than flying through the air to attend a sabbat.
I want to distinguish two separate witchcraft riddles. First there is the problem of why anyone should believe that witches fly through the air on broomsticks. And then there is the largely separate problem of why such a notion should have become so popular during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I think practical and mundane solutions can be found for both of these puzzles. To begin, let’s concentrate on the explanation of why and how witches flew to sabbats.
Despite the existence of a large number of “confessions,” little is actually known about the case histories of self-acknowledged witches. Some historians have maintained that the whole bizarre complex—the Devil’s pact, the broomstick flight, and the sabbat—was the invention of the witch burners rather than of the burnt witches. But as we shall see, at least some of the accused had a pretrial sense of being witches and fervently believed that they could fly through the air and have intercourse with devils.