When he was about thirty-five years old, Jesus became a holy man who, something like the Buddha, walked from place to place and preached to little groups, often in the open air. He was warm and forceful; speaking just a word or two to someone who approached him, he sometimes changed the person’s life. As he went, he gathered followers, including a tax collector and fishermen from the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Some of them would stay with Jesus till his death and then carry on his teaching.
Four people who had known him or had learned about him from his followers wrote short accounts of Jesus’s life. These “gospels” (or “good news”) tell us nearly all we know about him, but what they tell us isn’t always clear. Jesus himself caused some of the confusion. He liked to teach with parables, or little tales that make a point, usually about God and us. But often the point was not apparent to his hearers (Jesus was aware of this), nor is it clear to readers now. Take, for instance, the well-known parable of the younger son who wanders off, wastes his money, nearly starves to death, and finally returns to his family. One might suppose that Jesus wanted to teach fathers to forgive their erring children. But he probably meant to teach that God accepts the person who rejects and then returns to him.
Did Jesus see himself as teacher, rebel, or the son of God? Did he intend above all to beseech us to be meek and kind, or did he want to warn us to get ready for the ending of the world? Careful students of the Bible hotly disagree about these matters.
This writer thinks that Jesus meant to bring us shocking news. The world was ending, he declared, and the “Kingdom of God” was at hand. It wasn’t going to happen sometime in the future. No, the Kingdom of God was happening at that moment. You could enter it right then, right there. (He was not talking about a life after death, which is something he talked about very little.)
This means, he said, that the old moral laws were not enough. Yes, you must love each other (and he spoke movingly of that), but — and here he seems to contradict himself — you must also do things that will upset relationships. You must love not only your neighbor but also your enemy. You must leave your land and your family and follow Jesus. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth,” he said. “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law…he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”
He probably did not believe he was the son of God, or a rabbi or a rebel, but how he saw himself is not apparent. Much depends on whether the Gospels give us his authentic words, and what those words meant in his time. He presented himself as one who somehow actualized the Kingdom of God and made it happen even as he spoke.
During the two or three years when Jesus spread his message, Jewish leaders opposed him more and more. This is no surprise, since he sometimes seared them using burning words. For example: “You are like tombs covered with whitewash; they look fine from outside, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all kinds of filth.”
At the end of his life, when he was still in his thirties, Jesus and his followers went to Jerusalem for Passover, the annual celebration of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. He knew the trip was dangerous, and not only because he had Jewish enemies in Jerusalem. The city lay inside the Roman Empire, and its Roman chiefs would never tolerate a man who talked about the coming of a rival kingdom.
Just the same, he told his friends, he had to go to carry out God’s will. What might happen in Jerusalem was in the hands of God. His death could motivate his fellow Jews to make the change of heart he felt they needed for admission to the realm of God. “I must be on my way today and tomorrow and the next day,” he said, “because it is unthinkable for a prophet to meet his death anywhere but in Jerusalem, the city that murders the prophets, and stones the messengers sent to her.”
When they reached the city Jesus and his followers ate a Passover supper, which was to be their last meal together. The next day a follower betrayed him by pointing him out to a crowd of his enemies. A scuffle followed, and Jesus was led away. He appeared before a Jewish court, which concluded that he was blasphemously claiming to be the son of God. They turned him over to the Roman commissioner, telling him that Jesus claimed to be the king of the Jews. The commissioner asked Jesus if this was true, and Jesus answered strangely, “You have said so.” The Roman hesitated for a moment, but he ordered the troublemaker put to death.
Roman soldiers took him outside the city and crucified him, probably by nailing him to a crossbeam fastened to an upright shaft. Someone fastened a sign on it that read “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews,” and as he writhed in pain priests and others taunted him. At this point Jesus seemingly decided that his mission had been betrayed by God himself, who did nothing to prevent his suffering such pain. He wailed a sentence from a psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and soon he died.
His followers were shattered. They had lost their leader and did not know what to do. But then, the Gospel writers tell us, shocking things occurred. A well-off friend of Jesus had laid his body in a tomb cut in the rocky hillside, and rolled a disk-shaped stone across the front. But when his followers came near the tomb, they found the stone was rolled aside and Jesus’s body gone. What had happened to it? More amazing yet, Jesus then began appearing to his followers, briefly, here and there, like a ghost, but a ghost that one could speak to and touch. The appearances convinced them that Jesus had risen from the dead and that this confirmed the truth of all that he had taught.
His followers began to form religious groups. They spoke of Jesus as the Christ (meaning “the anointed”) and of themselves as Christians. Not surprisingly, most Christians in Jerusalem, who were surrounded by Jews, saw themselves mainly as a special group of Jews. They stuck with Jewish dietary laws and circumcised their baby boys, as God had ordered Abraham to do long before.
But some of them denounced the usual worship in the Temple and started to reject or reinterpret Jewish laws and customs. What counted, so they said, was the spirit, not the letter, of the laws — that, and believing what Jesus had taught. To say such things was dangerous. Angry vigilantes stoned to death a Christian preacher, Stephen, who had called their leaders “stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears.”
A leading enemy of Christians was a pious Jew named Saul. Short, balding, and bowlegged, he was a man of destiny. Although he had been trained as a rabbi, he earned his living making tents. After Jesus’s crucifixion he persecuted the early Christians, arresting them and sending them to prison.
One day when Saul was trudging down a road in Syria, he heard a voice that said, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The voice was that of Jesus. Saul immediately became a Christian believer. He was more than merely converted; he felt that God had called on him to bring a message of salvation “to the ends of the earth,” and he set out to do so. For some reason he dropped the name Saul and began to call himself Paul.
As a missionary, Paul had the benefit of living in the peaceful Roman Empire, where travel was possible, though not always safe. For the rest of his life, three busy decades, he sailed in ships along the Mediterranean and hiked the Roman roads to towns in Syria, Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Greece, and even to the great capital, Rome itself. In all these places he talked to little groups and converted a few of his hearers. After he had left them, he kept in touch with converts by writing them encouraging letters. He took terrible abuse from men and nature: he was jailed, pelted with stones, bitten by a viper, three times beaten with rods, five times whipped, and three times shipwrecked.
In the meantime, Paul transformed the message of the man who hailed him on the desert road. Jesus had aimed his words at Jews, but Paul was preaching not to Jews but pagans. He was therefore free to found what was almost a new religion, greatly aided by the fact that he knew very little about what Jesus had taught. (After Jesus spoke to him on the road in Syria, Paul waited three years before going to Jerusalem and meeting Jesus’s le
ading follower, Peter, and Jesus’s brother, James.)
Paul made Christianity more palatable to pagans by simply dropping much of Jewish “law.” For instance, he told the men who listened to him that in order to be Christians they need not be circumcised, like Jews. This teaching may have relieved the minds of many men.
What was most important to Paul was not what Jesus taught but who he was, and what his execution and his rising from the grave implied. Whereas Jesus had been almost guarded about who he was, Paul taught boldly that Jesus was the son of God, who had ushered in the soon-to-happen end of the world. Jesus’s death made amends for the sins of everyone, thus making it possible for everyone to be pardoned by God and admitted among the people of God. Paul’s teaching that Jesus had sacrificed his life on purpose was Paul’s major contribution to Christianity. Jesus never made that claim.
But how did Paul know that Jesus was the son of God, who died to atone for our sins? The evidence was the fact that after his death Jesus had risen from the grave and then appeared in several places to his followers and then to Paul himself. Those who heard this thrilling news, and who truly believed that Christ (that is, Jesus) had died for them, would be saved. As the world came to an end, a judgment day would follow, and the believers would join God.
Near the end of his life Paul was arrested in Jerusalem when Jews charged him with bringing a non-Jew into the inner courts of the Temple. The Roman rulers probably considered him a troublemaker, like Jesus, but unlike Jesus, Paul was legally a Roman citizen. When he claimed his right to appeal to the emperor, they sent him to Rome. Our source for Paul’s life, the Bible’s book of Acts, does not tell what happened next, but according to tradition he was put under house arrest for two years, then tried, convicted, and beheaded.
And what had Paul achieved in three busy decades? Well, he had taken what he had heard about the death of an obscure holy man and shaped it into a religion for everyone. Then he had scattered the seeds of this new faith over as much of the world as he could reach. If Jesus was the most influential figure in all of history, as some would say, then who was Paul?
After Paul died, Christianity kept spreading, slowly first, then very fast. In the next three hundred years, it soaked up other faiths (absorbing their beliefs), and at last Roman emperors decreed it was the state religion. It grew a large bureaucracy, run by wealthy men in velvet robes, built universities and churches, supported learning, preached of peace and sometimes stirred up wars, and advocated moral standards that were widely honored and ignored. It instructed many, many million people that God had promised them that after this world’s sorrows they would live again in heaven. Today a third of all the folk on earth describe themselves as Christians.
ISLAM, YOUNGEST OF the world religions, was born in Arabia, not far from where the Hebrew fathers led their flocks, and Moses spoke with God, and Jesus met his fate. Arabia is not so much a peninsula as an island, girdled on three sides by water and on the fourth by desert. Almost all of it is hot and dry and bare. Until recently most of the Arabs were nomads who wandered ceaselessly in search of grass for their camels, horses, sheep, and goats. They lived mainly on milk and on the dates they grew in the rare oases.
Before the time of Muhammad, founder of Islam, the Arabs weren’t a single people. Most of them belonged to tribes that often raided other tribes for camels, slaves, and horses, and to let their warriors test their courage. They shared a religion of shrines and spirits, but it appears that even before Muhammad’s birth some Arabs were beginning to believe in a single god.
Muhammad was born in about A.D. 570, not among the nomads on the desert sands but in the holy town of Mecca. The great distinction of his birthplace was a well-known shrine that Arabs called the Kaaba (meaning “cube”). It housed many idols, even images of Mary and Jesus. Mecca was also an oasis where camel caravans, bearing frankincense and spices through the desert, halted by the waters of the sacred Zamzam well.
His father had died on such a journey before Muhammad’s birth, and his mother died when he was about six. A grandfather took him in charge, but then he too died, so an uncle raised the boy. The family was poor, and Muhammad seems to have worked for a while as a shepherd and then a leader of caravans.
At the age of twenty-five, however, he married the woman he worked for, a well-off widow fifteen years older than Muhammad. Now he had some leisure, and opportunities to look at life. Probably he now observed the social gap between the wealthy, settled Arabs, like his wife, and those who still were nomads. He learned a bit about other religions, perhaps from Christian and Jewish Arabs, of which Arabia had many.
This is what Islam teaches about its founding: Muhammad often meditated in a mountain cave in the arid desert outside Mecca. While he was there, one day in about A.D. 610, the archangel Gabriel appeared to him. Gabriel told him that he, Muhammad, was the Messenger of God, and he told him to “recite.” Muhammad answered that he couldn’t read, but Gabriel insisted, saying:
Recite, in the name of the Lord, who created,
Created man from a clot of blood.
Recite, for the Lord is the most bounteous,
Who teacheth by the pen,
Teacheth man what he did not know.
In a state of terror, Muhammad hurried home. Feeling cold, he lay down and asked his wife to cover him. Then he heard that voice again, this time saying:
O thou wrapped in thy mantle,
Arise and warn!
Gabriel now began to tell Muhammad sacred truths in poetic prose. For the next two decades Muhammad would continue to hear and then repeat these messages. After his death in 632, Muslims wrote them down and put them in a sacred book, the Qur’an. A worldwide faith arose from revelations by an angel to an Arab in a cave.
That is the accepted story. Some modern scholars think the faith took shape more slowly. They point out that the earliest evidence of the Qur’an’s existence dates from 691, the year when Muslims built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. (This famous mosque is on the site from which Muhammad, in a vision, rose to heaven and met with God.) A few Qur’an inscriptions ornament the Dome, and they differ somewhat from the standard version of the Qur’an. These discrepancies suggest that decades after the prophet’s death the Qur’an was still evolving.
Muhammad began instructing any Arabs who would listen in the truths that he was learning from the angel. These were: that there is no god but the one God, Allah. That he, Muhammad, was God’s messenger and prophet. That a day of judgment was approaching. And that after dying those who followed God’s commands would go to paradise, while punishments were waiting for the others. That simple formulation was the heart of the religion that Muhammad was founding. The religion was Islam, or “submission” (that is, to the will of God). Its believers were (and are) the Muslims, “those who submit.”
Success as a religious leader came only slowly to the Prophet. His wife and family, another man who would later take his place, and several hundred others soon accepted Islam. Most of them were young men under thirty when they joined. Other Meccans, especially the prominent, were hostile to his teachings. Even those who led his clan opposed him. Perhaps he scared them when he taught that the poor had a rightful claim to the wealth of the rich.
At a trade fair Muhammad talked with men from Yathrib, an oasis north of Mecca. They, and later others from that town, became his followers. They invited him to come to Yathrib, hoping he could settle quarrels between the place’s rival factions. Since many of his fellow Meccans were hostile, even threatening to him, Muhammad welcomed the invitation. He sent his Meccan followers to Yathrib. Then Muhammad and a friend slipped out of Mecca, followed desert trails that were seldom used, and safely got to Yathrib in September 622. Muhammad renamed Yathrib Medina, or City of the Prophet.
In Medina, the Prophet and his fellow Muslims preyed on Meccan caravans that crossed the desert. Though few in number they had great success. The Meccans twice sent armies out to crush Medina, but Muhammad’s little army held them off.
The Muslims grew more sure than ever that God was with them. Muhammad meanwhile fought the Jews in Medina, who wouldn’t recognize him as a prophet. He drove away two Jewish clans, and later he attacked another clan, slew the men, and sold the rest as slaves.
In the year 630, the Prophet marched to Mecca and peacefully conquered it. He spared the lives of his enemies. While he did not insist on this, many of the Meccans now converted to Islam. Many tribes near Mecca and Medina allied with him and converted to Islam. When hostile Arabs sent an army to get rid of him, Muhammad routed it. Most of the Arabs allied with him and converted to the new religion.
He brought the warring tribes a faith that bonded and inspired them. “Muhammad is the Messenger of God,” says the Qur’an, “and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another. You see them bowing, prostrating, seeking bounty from God and good pleasure…. God has promised forgiveness and a mighty wage to those of them who believe and do deeds of righteousness.”2
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