Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History)

by Cahill, Thomas

  In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues, built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them.

  For all these reasons, the diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism. Many of these were wellborn women who presided over substantial households and who had likely tried out some of the Eastern mystery cults before settling on Judaism. (Nero’s wife Poppea was almost certainly one of these, and probably the person responsible for instructing Nero in the subtle difference between Christians and more traditional Jews, which he would otherwise scarcely have been aware of.) These gentiles did not, generally speaking, go all the way. Because they tended to draw the line at circumcision, they were not considered complete Jews. They were, rather, noachides, or God-fearers, gentiles who remained gentiles while keeping the Sabbath and many of the Jewish dietary restrictions and coming to put their trust in the one God of the Jews.

  Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, could turn out to be a difficult test of the commitment of the noachides. For here in the heart of the Jewish world, they encountered Judaism enragé, a provincial religion concerned only with itself, and ages apart from the rational, tolerant Judaism of the diaspora. In the words of Paul Johnson:

  The Temple, now, in Herod’s1 version, rising triumphantly over Jerusalem, was an ocular reminder that Judaism was about Jews and their history—not about anyone else. Other gods flew across the deserts from the East without much difficulty, jettisoning the inconvenient and embarrassing accretions from their past, changing, as it were, their accents and manners as well as their names. But the God of the Jews was still alive and roaring in his Temple, demanding blood, making no attempt to conceal his racial and primitive origins. Herod’s fabric was elegant, modern, sophisticated—he had, indeed, added some Hellenic decorative effects much resented by fundamentalist Jews who constantly sought to destroy them—but nothing could hide the essential business of the Temple, which was the ritual slaughter, consumption, and combustion of sacrificial cattle on a gigantic scale. The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple-soldiers, and minions. To the unprepared visitor, the dignity and charity of Jewish disapora life, the thoughtful comments and homilies of the Alexandrian synagogue, was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale. Sophisticated Romans who knew the Judaism of the diaspora found it hard to understand the hostility towards Jews shown by colonial officials who, behind a heavily-armed escort, had witnessed Jerusalem at festival time. Diaspora Judaism, liberal and outward-minded, contained the matrix of a universal religion, but only if it could be cut off from its barbarous origins; and how could so thick and sinewy an umbilical cord be severed?

  This description of “Herod’s” Temple (actually the Second Temple, built in the sixth century B.C. and rebuilt by Herod) is more than a bit overwrought. The God of the Jews did not roar in his Temple: the insoluble problem was that, since the destruction of the First Temple and, with it, the Ark of the Covenant, God had ceased to be present in his Temple. Nor would animal sacrifice have disgusted the gentiles, since Greeks, Romans, and all ancient peoples offered such sacrifices (though one cannot help wondering whether, had the Second Temple not been destroyed, it would today be ringed from morn to night by indignant animal-rights activists). But Johnson is right to emphasize that Judaism, in its mother city, could display a sweaty tribalism that gentiles would only find unattractive. The partisan, argumentative ambience of first-century Jerusalem, not unlike the atmosphere of the ultra-Orthodox pockets of the contemporary city, could repel any outsider, whether gentile or diaspora Jew.

  Perhaps most important is Johnson’s shrewd observation that Judaism “contained the matrix of a universal religion.” By this time, the more percipient inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world had come to the conclusion that polytheism, whatever manifestation it might assume, was seriously flawed. The Jews alone, by offering monotheism, offered a unitive vision, not the contradictory and flickering epiphanies of a fanciful pantheon of gods and goddesses. But could Judaism adapt to gentile needs, could it lose its foreign accent and outlandish manners? No one saw the opportunity more clearly than Luke; his gospel and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, present a Jesus and a Jesus Movement specifically tailored to gentile sensibility.

  Careful contemporary scholars stop just short of accepting unequivocally the identity ascribed to Luke in antiquity and attached to his gospel—“a Syrian of Antioch, by profession a physician, the disciple of the apostles, and later a follower of Paul until his martyrdom”—but there is little reason not to assume that Luke was a Greek-speaking gentile, writing for gentiles, and that he is the “Luke” mentioned in the Letter to Philemon as Paul’s “fellow worker” and as the “beloved physician” of the Letter to the Colossians. Luke may very well have come to Judaism as a noachide, spending many years in that position, since his knowledge of the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible in its Greek version, is broad and deep—even if his knowledge of Palestinian geography is sometimes faulty, as well as his understanding of Jewish custom and ritual. He wrote after Mark (who wrote in the late 60s), probably in the 80s a little after Matthew. We do not know where he wrote or for whom, except that we are sure he did not write for Palestinians or for born Jews of any kind.

  We are also sure that he did not know Jesus. As he tells us at the outset of his gospel, he is the recipient of extant traditions both oral (“just as the original eyewitnesses passed them on to us”) and written (“since many have undertaken to compile an orderly account of the things that have come to fulfillment among us”). But these written accounts seem to be lacking something in Luke’s eyes, moving him to create his own: “I too have decided, after investigating everything carefully from the beginning, to put [these events] systematically in writing.” The earlier written accounts, though “orderly,” lacked a refined system and were not careful enough in their research. This would have been the typical reaction of a cultivated Greek writer to the stylistic infelicities and lacunae of a writer like Mark—and the tactful indirectness of Luke’s criticism is further proof of his excellent Greek education. Luke opens his account with an elegant periodic sentence, which concludes with a characteristic Greek flourish of dedication: “for you, Theophilus, so that Your Excellency may realize what assurance you have for the instruction you have received.” We know nothing of Theophilus—it is even possible that he is meant to be symbolic of all Luke’s readers, for his name means “God-lover”—but the framing of a long narrativ
e as if it were a letter is a common Greco-Roman literary device.

  Mark, in giving Jesus his first utterance (“The Time has come … open your hearts”), sets forth the dominant theme of his gospel. Matthew does the same by giving us the Beatitudes at the beginning of Jesus’s first sermon. No less does Luke lay before us his understanding of the core of Jesus’s message by presenting us with a scene that he sets at the outset of Jesus’s public ministry. After Jesus’s baptism and his being tempted by Satan in the desert, he returns to Galilee “filled with the power of the Spirit”:

  When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath as was his custom. He stood up to read the Scripture and was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll, he came to this passage [and read aloud]:

  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

  for he has anointed me to bring the Good News to the poor:

  healing the broken-hearted,

  proclaiming liberation to prisoners,

  giving sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed,

  proclaiming the Time of the Lord’s favor.

  He then rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. And all eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him as he began to speak to them: “Today is this text fulfilled, even as you sit listening.”

  If Mark begins with his apocalyptic sense of “the Time” that has come, and Matthew with his overwhelming Jewish sense of the obligations of Justice incumbent on all those who would live in God’s blessedness, Luke sees Jesus himself as the theme, Jesus the bearer of glad tidings to the poor (who are so seldom the recipients of good news), Jesus the healer, Jesus the liberator, Jesus who enlightens, Jesus who frees. We come to the truth by watching Jesus intently (“all eyes … fixed on him”), for his every movement (his standing up, his unrolling of the scroll, his choice of text, his rolling of the scroll, his returning it to the synagogue official, his sitting among us) is redolent with meaning. In Luke, the elegant writer from whose polished pen the Greek flows effortlessly, Jesus moves through his life with unhurried dignity—in almost stately progression—toward his appointed end. This is not to say that Luke is inventing, just that he is capable of setting a scene to dramatic effect with a facility unavailable to the earlier evangelists, who were probably translating in their heads from Aramaic to Greek and just trying to keep their tenses straight.

  But there are ways in which Luke not only dramatizes but softens the material he has taken from Mark so as not to trouble or unduly offend gentile sensibility. In Luke, though Nazareth rejects Jesus (in prophetic foreshadowing of his rejection by the Jewish nation), Jesus’s family never has any doubts. Jesus never chastises Peter (as he does explicitly in Mark and Matthew); and the stupidity of the disciples, who are always misunderstanding Jesus in the earlier evangelists, is lessened and excused. By the 80s, the family of Jesus and his principal disciples, almost all of whom were now deceased, had assumed heroic reputations in Christian circles; and Luke sees no reason to emphasize their failings. But these alterations go beyond tact. In Luke, we are looking at Jesus’s story through a gentile lens, which viewed the biographies of great men as exemplars for others to emulate. So the great men and women of the Christian tradition must not be shown as muddled, contentious, or craven; and the central figure, Jesus, must be allowed as much dignity and distance from criticism as possible. Thus, in Luke’s treatment of the call of Matthew Levi, the Pharisees and their scribes direct their ire at Jesus’s disciples, not at Jesus himself (as they do in Mark), for eating and drinking with “tax collectors and prostitutes.”

  The Jews, in their emphasis on justice and its lack, were familiar with guilt. They had no trouble portraying their greatest king, David, as a murderer beset by lust, a man who must come to feel the sharp, inner pangs of guilt for his abysmally unjust actions. Greco-Roman literary and imaginative traditions enshrined no such scenes. For the Greeks and Romans, sin—hamartia—was not personal, the result of an evil choice, made against the Law of God written in their hearts. Rather, it was an unavoidable flaw, such as Oedipus’s hamartia, his tragic mistake in murdering his father and marrying his mother, while believing he had done everything to avoid these very actions. For gentiles, what we may think of as a more “Oriental” orientation prevailed: rather than guilt, they were much more likely to feel shame, a far less socially constructive emotion.2 The great figures of the Christian tradition must not, therefore, be shown by their admiring biographer in shameful, slovenly, or compromising situations.

  Luke’s alterations are occasional; and it is tempting to make more of them than is warranted by his text. In the controversy over Jesus’s notorious dinner companions, for instance, Luke gives us the same answer as Mark, when Jesus, addressing the objections of the Pharisees and their scribes, says: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. I have not come to call the upright but sinners”—Luke adding only eis metanoian (“to a change of heart”), which hardly constitutes a change of meaning. We discover in Luke’s Gospel a subtle development of the kerygma for presentation to a gentile audience, but a development without substantial discontinuity.

  If the pagan emphasis on outward show—the bella figura that still ices Italian social life—leads Luke to minor revisions of the Marcan tradition, other elements of gentile sensibility may have impelled the third evangelist to search for stories beyond those that Mark and Matthew had collected, stories that would enable his particular audience to connect with Jesus; and we find in Luke a series of encounters and anecdotes recounted nowhere else in the books of the New Testament. For example, in Luke’s redaction of the dialogue in which Jesus articulates the two commandments that summarize the whole Law of Moses (love of God and neighbor), Jesus’s interlocutor—a lawyer with a lawyerly turn of mind—poses a further question: “And just who is my neighbor?” Jesus replies:

  “A certain man was traveling down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him, and left him for dead. Now it so happened that a priest was going down the same road, but when he saw the man [lying there], he crossed to the other side and continued on his way. In the same way, a levite3 also came upon the scene, saw the man, crossed to the other side of the road, and continued on his way. But a traveling Samaritan came upon him; and when he saw him, he was moved to compassion. He went right over to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring olive oil and wine [costly salves] over them. He then lifted the man onto his own mount, brought him to an inn, and nursed him there. The following day, he produced two silver pieces, which he gave the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and on my return I shall reimburse you for any additional expenses you may incur.’ Which of these three, would you say, was a neighbor to him who fell into the hands of robbers?” [The lawyer] replied, “The one who showed him kindness.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

  It is fair to say that there is no teaching of Jesus with wider currency than this story of the Good Samaritan, who makes his only appearance in Luke’s Gospel. There is no cause to think that Luke made the story up and put it in Jesus’s mouth. Its accurate Palestinian setting—the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, which was indeed perilous—all but forbids such a conclusion. More than this, the parable of the Good Samaritan is of a piece with the most basic substrate of Jesus’s teachings: the obligation of kindness to everyone and anyone who falls across my path, especially someone in trouble.

  But we may posit a reason why Mark and Matthew, evangelists closely associated with Jewish communities in Palestine and the diaspora, failed to include this story. The Jews despised the sectarian Samaritans, who possessed the Torah but not the Prophets and who worshiped not in the Jerusalem Temple but on Mount Gerizim to the north. There is no hatred so intense as odium theologicum—hatred for those nearby who are religiously similar to oneself but nonetheless different. Through the ages, Christians, for instance, have been far more hateful to Jews, to Muslims, and to one
another than they have ever been to Buddhists and Hindus. The Samaritans were the neighboring heretics; and for them the Jews reserved a contempt they did not display even toward gentiles. Is it not possible that Mark and Matthew felt they could overlook this one example of Jesus’s teaching on universal kindness (after all, they already had so many others), since a Samaritan as the model of Christ-like behavior would rub so many Jewish Christians the wrong way?

  But Luke’s gentile Christians needed to be reassured that there was more than one way to be Christ-like, more than one path that could be taken if you would follow in the footsteps of the Master. You needn’t be a born Jew, raised in the traditions of the ancestors. There was no background that was unthinkable: it was even possible to be something as freaky as a Samaritan. As we stand now at the entrance to the third millennium since Jesus, we can look back over the horrors of Christian history, never doubting for an instant that if Christians had put kindness ahead of devotion to good order, theological correctness, and our own justifications—if we had followed in the humble footsteps of a heretical Samaritan who was willing to wash someone else’s wounds, rather than in the self-regarding steps of the priest and the immaculate steps of the levite—the world we inhabit would be a very different one.