All living things must reproduce themselves. For no matter how long-lived the individual members of a species may be, without reproduction the natural perils of existence will inexorably deplete their numbers until eventually the species becomes extinct. What this also means, however, is that all living things must die. For without some natural limit to the lifespan of each of the species’ individual members, a reproducing species will naturally go on reproducing until its population exceeds that which its environment is able to sustain, thus leading to a catastrophic collapse which, given enough iterations of this growth and extermination cycle, will also eventually lead to extinction. Thus it is that life necessarily entails death. One cannot have the one without the other.
Mercifully, the individual members of most species live out their allotted lifespans blissfully oblivious to this brutal logic. Otherwise, they would all be as riven by existential angst as the members of the one species we know is cursed with this knowledge, most of whom live large parts of their lives all too well aware that one day, in all probability, they will simply cease to exist. Indeed, it is this dreadful shadow, which hangs over all of us, that has probably done more to shape human history than any other fact of life, eliciting from us various coping strategies that have formed at least part of every culture and civilization that has ever existed.
These coping strategies largely fall under four broad categories, the first two of which are probably best represented by two philosophies from classical antiquity. The first of these, first fully articulated by Epicurus of Samos in the late 4th century BC, is commonly, though wrongly thought to be epitomised by the maxim ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. In reality, however, epicureanism is far more nuanced than this. For while Epicurus’ overall philosophy was based on the empiricism of Democritus and Aristotle, which held that the world we experience through our senses is the only one that exists and that death is the end of both the body and the soul – a view of existence which led him to conclude that the only good which is to be found in life is whatever pleasure we are able to extract from it – he also argued that, given the natural perils of our existence and the irrational, often intemperate behaviour of our fellow man, the best life we can reasonably hope for is one primarily characterized by ataraxia (peace and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of pain). Far from advocating unbridled hedonism, he believed, in fact, that over-indulgence in the appetites of the flesh led to dissipation and self-destruction, and warned his followers that immoral behaviour would only burden them with guilt. His recommendation, therefore, was that one should rather endeavour to pursue a quiet life of modest pleasures surrounded by friends.
If epicureanism has thus been significantly distorted in the popular imagination, the same could also be said for what is often thought to be its polar opposite, but which is far more closely related to it than is generally understood. For the philosophy of stoicism, first put forward by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC, not only confronts the same question as epicureanism – that of how to live one’s life in the face of certain death – but offers a solution which is not totally dissimilar, not least because, to most stoics, a peaceful life was not just to be desired in itself, but was also seen as a prerequisite for that which they more fundamentally sought: the satisfaction of a life well lived – or, in stoic terms, a virtuous life – the very idea of which required, first and foremost, significant amounts of time spent in study and quiet contemplation in order to properly comprehend what such a life might comprise. For while Zeno of Citium may have outlined stoicism’s fundamental principles, coming to fully understand them and incorporating them into one’s life, such that one actually lives them, requires a lifetime of study and diligent application.
This may be more easily appreciated, perhaps, if we consider one such principle in particular: that of prohairesis. Especially prominent in the later stoic writings of Epictetus, a Greek slave who lived in Rome during the 1st century AD, prohairesis is a complex and, to many, rather elusive concept which is variously translated as ‘volition’, ‘control’, ‘intention’ and ‘moral choice’. What all these proffered translations have in common, however, is that they are all ‘active’ in the sense that when we act intentionally, of our own volition, on the basis of moral choice, it is we who are in control and acting upon the world, rather than the world acting on us and us merely reacting to it – often with very little intention or control – something which most stoics once again believed was not just desirable in itself but a necessary prerequisite for a virtuous life.
This is because any virtuous life also entailed making a positive contribution to the world. Indeed, nearly all stoic principles are directed towards this end. For while study and quiet contemplation are all well and good, they only have virtue if they actually enable one to do good, which, in turn, not only requires that one is able to discern what the ‘good’ is, but that one is sufficiently controlled in both the choice and execution of ones actions that one is able to bring the good about. After all, there is no point in knowing what the ‘good’ is if one then acts out of fear or jealousy to the detriment of the good.
An even more fundamental attribute of prohairesis, therefore, is what one might call ‘mindfulness’: a state of conscious awareness, both of oneself and of others, which not only ensures that one is able to exercise volition and control, but that one is also able to act positively and constructively in a social context: a talent or ability which is yet another prerequisite for making any kind of positive contribution to the society in which one lives, not least because making any such contribution almost always requires one to work with others. This in turn, therefore, requires us to treat others in ways that are conducive to collaboration, which not only means treating them honestly and fairly, but with respect, understanding and at least a modicum of consideration for their needs, none of which comes easily to us. Indeed, without the mindfulness and conscious effort which the stoics sought to nurture in themselves, one might almost say that it is antithetical to our very nature. For absorbed in our own affairs, it is all too easy for us to fall into a state of thoughtlessness, in which we are hardly aware of ourselves let alone the offence our lack of thought so often causes to others.
Worse still, our self-absorption can also skew our perception of where we stand in relation to others, leading to an over-inflated sense of our own importance, which not only has a tendency to provoke irritation and resistance in others, but can make it seem as if the world is not giving us our due, or is even treating us unfairly. This can then lead to such negative emotions as resentment, envy and even hatred, which not only further damage our relationships with others, but are a bane upon our own lives as well, blinding us to truth and reason while filling us with bitterness and bile.
To prevent this slide into the moral abyss, what stoicism most fundamentally advocated, therefore, was a lifelong quest to fully know and understand both ourselves and the world around us: a world which not only includes the society of which we are a part, but the natural order to which we are also connected, where the perennial cycle of life and death not only provides us with a constant reminder of who and what we are – thereby helping us to keep our feet on the ground and our hopes, fears and emotions firmly in check – but enables us to make the positive contribution to the world that will ultimately allow us to face death with equanimity, content in the knowledge that we have lived our lives as best we could.
The only problem with this aspiration, of course, is that, in addition to requiring considerable intellectual resources to understand why it so desirable in the first place, the practice of stoicism – the turning of its principles into attributes of one’s own character – also requires immense self-discipline and a level of self-knowledge of which few of us, I suspect, are even capable, making it hardly surprising, therefore, that most of those who have espoused stoicism throughout history, like the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, have tended to be rather exceptional individuals, making it equally unsurprising, therefore, that in those societies that have been wealthy enough to provide the means, the much preferred strategy for coping with death – or, perhaps more accurately, for avoiding having to think about it altogether – has been that based on the popular parody of epicureanism.
In the modern era, in particular, in which industrialisation has produced wealth on a scale never seen before, and where every reader of a celebrity magazine or buyer of a lottery ticket can dream of one day having everything they ever wanted, unbridled hedonism has become what is probably the generally accepted ideal: that to which most people in the west now implicitly aspire, even though it has probably been the cause of more disappointment and unhappiness than many of the privations of harder times, leading to what is probably the most self-destructive form of hedonism ever invented: an addiction to narcotics.
Given our preference for chemically induced self-forgetfulness over stoic mindfulness, it is probably somewhat fortunate, therefore, that throughout most of our history, most people have simply been unable to afford such indulgences, and have consequently chosen a third option for dealing with death: one which does not see death as an end at all, but rather as a point of transition, from one form of existence to another; from the corporeal life we experience here on earth, to an eternal life of the spirit, lived on some other transcendental plain. And it is this belief – in the immortality of the soul and the necessary existence, therefore, of some alternative realm in which this immortal soul can continue after death – that most people would probably say is what defines something as a religion.
In this, however, they would not be entirely correct. For while a belief in the immortality of the soul may be a sufficient condition for a system of beliefs to be characterised in this way, it is not a necessary condition, in that there have been plenty of religions which have made no such promise of eternal life to their followers, the pantheistic religion of ancient Greece being a good example. For while there may be Greek myths which tell of a land of the dead called Hades, and others which describe the abode of the gods on Mount Olympus, to the best of my knowledge, no mortal was ever invited to go and live with the gods after death, and Hades wasn’t exactly the most inviting of places in which to end up. Which is probably why the Greeks turned to philosophy instead.
More importantly, there are a number of good reasons why most early religions were rather vague about what happens to human beings after we die. For primarily designed to make sense of the natural world, most of the mythological narratives our ancestors created were not about themselves. If they appear to be populated by beings who are very much like us, it is because, lacking any scientific knowledge of the world, the only way our forefathers could explain what they saw going on around them was in human or anthropocentric terms. Thus, if the wind blew down their house, it was because it chose to do so, possibly because it was angry at them for building it in the wrong place: something about which they’d have to take more care when they rebuilt it. For based on the belief that the spirits which animated nature had much the same motives as ourselves, what primarily drove the religious practices of our forebears was the need to exert some control over these unruly beings, either by imposing rules upon themselves, or by finding various ways to placate their tormentors and hence induce them to be less gratuitously destructive of their lives and property. What this meant, however, was that even when they performed rites or rituals with intensely human associations, including the sacrifice of things they held precious to them – including other human beings – the religion they practiced was still not really about themselves.
Nor did this significantly change when, with the coming of the agrarian age and the aggregation of tribal peoples into more broadly based cultures, individual gods started to be organised into hierarchical pantheons. For while these pantheons may have provided a stage on to which human beings could project their own social and moral interactions, thereby submitting them to public scrutiny and debate – a bit like soap operas – given the origins and personalities of the gods portrayed, their immense power and their apparent indifference to our lives and welfare, it would still have been hard to conceive of any relationship we could possibly have to these beings other than that of providing an audience to their shenanigans, with no obvious way for us to join them in the immortal realm except through the stories which others might one day also tell of us: such being the immortality of Achilles.
For a religion to progress to the next stage, therefore – and so become what most people today think of as a religion – it first and foremost had to create a shared moral universe in which both gods and men not only had meaningful roles but a meaningful relationship: an extremely difficult trick to pull off, which, in original terms, has probably only been accomplished on two or three occasions, all other advanced religions being in some way derived from these original models.
One of the earliest of these was that devised by a Persian priest called Zoroaster, though when exactly he lived is a matter of some debate. Zoroastrian tradition, for instance, places his birth sometime around the late 7th century BC. As Zoroastrianism – known to its adherents as Mazdayasna, meaning the ‘Worship of Wisdom’ – was already the official religion of a vast empire by this time, however, such a late date is highly unlikely. In fact, linguistic analysis of Avestan, the language in which the sacred books of Zoroastrianism were written, would indicate a date of writing up to a thousand years earlier.
It is also unclear where he lived. For while eastern Persia is most expert’s favoured choice, arguments can also be made for both Bactria in central Asia and northwest India, this very vagueness surrounding his place of birth lending further weight to the distant antiquity of its occurrence.
All we really know for sure, therefore, is that sometime between the 17th and 7th centuries BC, this mystic visionary took the pantheon of a pre-existing polytheistic religion, native to a region somewhere between eastern Persia and north western Afghanistan, and reorganised it into what was essentially a monotheistic dualism, in which the now singular God, Ahura Mazda, Lord of Light, Enlightenment and Wisdom, acted upon the world through a number of lesser deities known as Spenta Mainyu or ‘Bounteous Immortals’, who, in Judaeo-Christian terms, might best be thought of as somewhat akin to archangels. What was truly transformative about Zoroaster’s new cosmology, however, is the fact that, although Ahura Mazda is defined as essentially good, he is also responsible for having created Darkness and Evil: an apparent contradiction which Zoroaster ingeniously used not only to solve the problem of human finitude but of our apparent purposelessness in what, for us, would seem to be a meaningless universe. For in order to explain this contradiction, he put forward the idea that Ahura Mazda actually brought Darkness and Evil into existence for our sake: to give human beings the freedom of moral choice.
The significance of this, however, lies mostly in its implications. For why would God give us the freedom of moral choice if it made no difference to our fate how we exercised that choice? The answer is: ‘He wouldn’t’. The very existence of moral choice, therefore – indeed, the very existence of Darkness and Evil in the world – would seem to indicate that death cannot be the absolute end we supposed it to be. For unless God has some ulterior motive in providing us with this gift – a possibility which would rather contradict the premise that He is essentially good – the only conceivable reason why He would put us through this trial is that which Zoroaster now revealed was vouchsafed to him in a vision provided by one of God’s Bounteous Immortals: namely, to give human beings an opportunity to prove themselves worthy and hence be rewarded with the gift of eternal life.
This then had two further implications. For if death is not the ineluctable end of life we had always thought it to be, and if, too, life after death is dependent upon how we perform in this earthly life, then this effectively reverses the relationship that had previously existed between gods and men – in which men were merely the spectators of the gods – and replaces it with one in which we are now the ones being watched – and, indeed, judged – by God. Even more importantly, what this further does, of course, is suddenly give our lives a purpose. For if God is watching and judging us to determine whether we are worthy of eternal life, then becoming worthy must surely be our aim.
Nor is it particularly difficult to work out what we must do to achieve this. For if God is good and has given us the freedom to choose between good and evil, then there is a fairly good chance that He wants us to be good too. Moreover, we already know how to do this. For while, like the founders of most religions, Zoroaster handed down a set of moral rules to his followers, which he told them had been revealed to him in his vision, the reality is that for any moral philosophy to gain intuitive acceptance and thus be felt as ‘right’, it actually has to be grounded in our own moral sensibility, which not only includes an innate sense of justice and fairness, but a natural empathy for those we perceive to be like ourselves, and a sympathetic concern for all sentient beings we find in need or distress. If one adds to this the fact that anyone of any intelligence who has had any experience of the world will have already observed the dozens of different ways in which people can ruin their own lives – whether it be through dissipation, lack of emotional control, or the rejection and alienation that comes from the thoughtless mistreatment of others – then it will hardly come as a surprise that most of the moral codes included in religious teachings have been more or less versions of that taught by the stoics, their only variations arising from differences in the historical circumstances of their inception and the precise reason given as to why human beings must endure this mortal existence in the first place.
For while being accorded moral choice and a chance to earn eternal life are all well and good – and certainly better than the alternative – given that an alternate realm must already exist in order to accommodate this eternal life, the question one has to ask, therefore, is why we couldn’t have just been placed in this an alternate realm from the outset? Why do we have to go through this trial of mortal existence? To prove ourselves worthy? Well, why couldn’t we have just been born worthy, especially given the fate awaiting those who, according to Zoroastrianism, fail the test? For as in the case of both Judaism and Christianity, Zoroastrianism also has its day of judgement. It happens, in fact, three days after we die and takes place on something called the Chinvat bridge – also known, for obvious reasons, as the sifting bridge – which the dead soul must cross in order to reach his desired destination, but which widens or narrows depending upon how good or bad he has been in life. If he has been good and manages to cross the bridge, he is then greeted by one of Ahura Mazda’s bounteous immortals called Vohu Manah – variously translated as ‘The Good Purpose’, ‘The Good Mind’ or ‘The Good Thought’ – who ushers the successful supplicant into the ‘House of Song’, otherwise known as paradise, from the Avestan word ‘pairi-daêza’, meaning a walled garden. If the dead soul fails to make it across the bridge, however – due to his less than virtuous behaviour in life – he is alternatively dragged down into the ‘House of Lies’, the Zoroastrian equivalent of hell, where he is then tortured by daemons for all eternity in ways very similar to those described in Dante’s Inferno.
Indeed, so terrible are the punishments awaiting those who fail the test of life that one has to question whether taking this risk is actually a better option than simply accepting oblivion, especially as we don’t know how high the bar has been set: whether it is only the worst of humanity who get condemned to hell, or whether it’s only the best who get admitted into heaven. Indeed, it even raises the question as to whether Zoroaster’s assumption, that God is good, is actually correct. For creating human beings just to sift out the best of us, while condemning the rest to never ending torment, seems pretty nasty to me. Indeed, you could almost call it the very definition of evil.
In fact, so deeply offensive is this gratuitous cruelty to most people’s sense of justice that it’s probably why other advanced religions looked for alternative reasons as to why we should have been placed in this vale of tears. One option, for instance, is to suppose that our life here on earth is intended as a learning process: an idea which gained particular traction in religions like Buddhism which also believe in reincarnation, thus providing individuals with numerous lifetimes, in different sentient forms, in which to rid themselves of both their fear of death and their sense of self, thereby allowing them to become at one with the universe and ascend to a higher plain.
Unfortunately, there are also options which are arguably even worse than Zoroastrianism’s simple sifting, one of the most insidious and corrosive of which has probably done more to shape western civilization than all the other elements of our cultural heritage put together, it being the idea that we were actually put here on earth as a punishment, either for our disobedience in acquiring precisely the knowledge of good and evil which Zoroaster supposed God intended us to have, or, far more cogently, for the loss of innocence which the acquisition of this knowledge inevitably wrought upon us. For it is this latter, rather than our infringement of God’s rules, that clearly gives the story of Adam and Eve its resonance and power: the sorrow and the pity we feel for this hapless couple – and, indeed, for all mankind – stemming from the dreadful but instantly persuasive suggestion that we were ejected from paradise – from the Garden of Eden – and made mortal, not because we couldn’t resist doing exactly what God had told us not to do, but because, in the process, we discovered sex, and hence procreation, and therefore had to die.
What makes this story so corrosive of human happiness, however, is not just its eerie congruence with evolutionary necessity – which is what makes it so compelling. Nor is it the fact that it promotes the innocence of children, rather than the maturity of reasoned moral choice, as the ideal moral state. It is rather that, in making our loss of innocence, rather than our disobedience, our principal offence – at least in the popular imagination – and equating this loss of innocence with both our becoming mortal and our fall, we effectively made becoming mortal both our crime and our punishment. Worst still, this self-punishing crime, or sin, has necessarily remained with us down the millennia, passed on through the reproductive congress of every generation of our primogenitors’ descendants and made manifest in every detail of our daily lives. For to be mortal is to be hostage to the biological functions of a corporeal body: functions which are not just symbols and reminders of our original sin, but are aspects of our still fallen and degenerate state, and are therefore sinful in themselves, making their avoidance, or at least their minimisation through abstinence and self-denial, the only possible basis for anything even approaching a good or shameless life.
Nor is this the only life-negating implication that can be derived from a belief in life on earth as punishment. For given that the sins of the flesh are greatly facilitated by wealth and that the enjoyment of good food, fine wines and attractive members of the opposite sex are really only possible if one has the free time, leisure and money to afford them, then wealth, itself, becomes morally questionable. In fact, it could even be argued that by providing us with the means to indulge our sinfulness – thereby giving rise to temptation – wealth is actually as sinful as our biological condition, thus not only making it as difficult for a rich man to get into heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, but rendering poverty, like chastity, a virtue.
In fact, once the concept of original sin has been fully absorbed into a culture, as it was by Christianity, there is almost no limit to the ways in which its implications can be drawn out to make life on earth as joyless and unpleasant as possible, even adding to our misery by encouraging such purgative practices as extreme asceticism, the wearing of hair shirts and the mortification of the flesh through self-flagellation. What is rather remarkable, therefore, is that while the concept of original sin is common to both Christianity and Judaism – Christianity having inherited it from the latter – it did not have quite the same effect on the older religion, partly, one suspects, because Judaism had already had more than a millennium to build up a prophylactic barrier against its insidious logic – principally by developing a system of prescriptive laws which so circumscribed Jewish life that all one had to do to avoid sin was simply follow the rules – but also because, due to a number of cosmological differences between the two religions – of which many Christians, I suspect, are largely unaware – Christians had far more reason to fear dying in a state of sin than their Jewish counterparts.
This is nowhere better illustrated, in fact, than with regard to the issue just discussed: that of wealth. For no Jew would have ever worried about not getting into heaven as a result of being too rich, partly because there is nothing in the Tora which prohibits a man from providing for himself and his family, but mostly because, historically, Judaism lacked the necessary concept of ‘heaven’.
Yes, there was a place called shamayi h'shamayim or the ‘heaven of heavens’ where God Himself dwelt, surrounded by his angels. But like Mount Olympus, very few mortals were ever invited to abide there after their deaths, the one exception being the prophet Elijah who, on departing this life, is said to have been whisked off to heaven in a fiery chariot, there to sit at God’s right hand. Everyone else, however, had to wait for the End of Days and the coming of the Kingdom of God, which, in all likelihood, was to be founded here on earth. I say this because, on the Day of Judgement, according to the Book of Daniel (12:2), ‘those who sleep in the dust of the earth’ shall rise from their graves to be resurrected in the flesh – which rather suggests that it is going to happen here in a terrestrial setting, rather than on some celestial plain – ‘some awaking to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt’, though where this latter group is actually going to experience this everlasting shame and contempt is not made clear. For just as Judaism lacked the relevant concept of heaven, so it also lacked any concept of hell, along with any kind of Prince Darkness to preside over it: something which I suspect will also come as a bit of a surprise to many Christians, who no doubt imagine that the figure of Satan looms large across every page of the Old Testament.
In this, however, they are very much mistaken. For in my New English Bible translation of the OT the word ‘Satan’ occurs just twice, and one of these, in the First Book of Chronicles 21:1, is almost certainly a mistranslation. I say this because the Hebrew term ‘ha satan’ – always written using the definite article ‘ha’, thereby strongly indicating that it is not intended as a proper noun or name – actually means ‘the enemy’, ‘the opponent’ or ‘the adversary’, which is how it is understood in every one of the numerous places it occurs in the Jewish Tanakh, and how, indeed, it is translated in all but one of the other places it occurs in the Old Testament. This other exception is in the Book of Job, where Satan does, indeed, appear as a character: one who makes a wager with God that, by stripping Job of all his good fortune and subjecting him to a series of ever more devastating hardships, he can induce him to curse God to his face. Far from indicating that the Prince of Darkness must therefore have had a place in Judaic cosmology, however, this very odd usage of the term ‘ha satan’ more or less proves the opposite. For if there had been a devil in Judaic cosmology, then he would have had a name which the writer of the Book of Job would have known, and would not therefore have had to use ‘ha satan’ as a kind of euphemistic title instead – something like ‘The Adversary’ – which also suggests that, far from being original to Judaism, the Book of Job is almost certainly a translation from some other source: a conclusion which is independently confirmed by the fact that there are two earlier versions of the Job story originating from Mesopotamia.
The earliest of these, called ‘A Man and his God’, was discovered by Samuel Noah Krame in 1953 and is thought to date from around 1700 BC, it being one of the few extant texts written in Sumerian. The second is the Ludlul bēl nēmeqi – ‘I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom’ – also known as ‘The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’. Written in Akkadian during the reign of the Kassite king, Nazi-Maruttaš (ca. 1307–1282 BC), it was composed by a high ranking court official called Subsi-masra-Sakkan, and is a series of meditations on the subject of suffering which clearly prefigure a number of Job’s dialogues.
This therefore raises an important question. For if Judaism lacked the concepts of both heaven and hell, and had no figure corresponding to that of the devil, from whence did Christianity come by these fundamental elements in its theological cosmology? Not, of course, that the answer is particularly difficult to work out, especially given the fact that Zoroastrianism possessed the very epitome of the Prince of Darkness in a daeva or ‘Destructive Spirit’ called Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman, who didn’t so much turn to the dark side as find himself created that way – by the Lord of Light, himself – in order to seduce mankind into choosing evil, thereby giving us the freedom of moral choice. The problem, therefore, is rather one of tradition. For while Christians freely recognise the debt of Christianity to Judaism – having incorporated most of the Tanakh into their Bible – no such recognition has ever been accorded to Zoroastrianism, making the suggestion that it might have a similarly seminal influence something of a novelty.
Looked at historically, however, the probability of there being some level of cross fertilisation between the two religions is extremely high. Indeed, given the geographical proximity of the two religions’ native homelands, it would be surprising if Zoroastrianism hadn’t exerted at least some influence, not just on Christianity, but on Judaism as well. After all, it was the official religion of the Persian Empire, which, at its peak, during the Achaemenid dynasty – from 550 to 330 BC – extended from the Indus to the Mediterranean, covering an area of some 2.1 million square miles, in which as much as 40% of the world’s entire human population lived, most of whom spoke some version or dialect of the Empire’s official language, Aramaic – the language which Jesus and his disciples spoke – while many of them would have also practiced its non-obligatory but official religion.
More to the point, from 597 BC, when the Kingdom of Judah was captured by the Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar II, until 150 BC, when Yohanan Maccabeus finally restored its independence, all the traditional lands of Israel that had once made up King David’s Unified Kingdom – from Edom in the south, to Galilee in the north – were effectively under Persian rule, albeit through proxies in a number of cases. Nor did this change in 539 BC when Cyrus the Great allowed that part of the Judean population which had been taken into exile by the Babylonians to return home. For while around forty thousand Jews may have been restored to their homeland and allowed practice their own religion, the secular and military government of that homeland was still in the hands of its Persian governor of Satrap.
The result was that for the next two hundred years or so, the Jews of Judah were obliged to live alongside their new Persian overlords: something which, for the most part, they actually managed to do quite amicably, not least because, for the period, Achaemenid rule was both relatively enlightened and benign. Not only did the Achaemenids allow the Jews to practice their religion and live according to their laws as set down in the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, but they even provided the funds needed to rebuild the Temple which had been destroyed by the Babylonians. They also encouraged Hebrew scriptural scholarship and writing, with the result that much of the Tanakh as we know it today was assembled during this period, with many older books being revised and edited, including Proverbs and Isaiah – to which ten new chapters were added – while a number of new books were also written, including those of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi and very probably Joel. Crucially, too, it was during this period that the Book of Job was incorporated into the Judaic canon, almost certainly as a result of cultural interaction between Judaic scholars and their Persian patrons, such that had this relatively harmonious coexistence between Persians and Jews been allowed to continue, it is very probable that Judaism would have absorbed even more Zoroastrian ideas.
What prevented this, of course, was the appearance of Alexander the Great and the defeat of the last Achaemenid king, Darius III, at the battle of Gaugamela in 330 BC, followed by Alexander’s own death in Babylon in 323 BC, after which his empire was divided up between his leading generals, principally Ptolemy, who was already Satrap of Egypt at that time, and who simply claimed the province as his own, and Seleucus, who, after a number of internal wars, eventually managed to take control of most of the former Achaemenid territories, thereby founding a new ruling dynasty in Persia: that of the Seleucids.
Not that for the Jews everything changed immediately, not least because during the aforementioned civil wars in Persia, Ptolemy managed capture most of the former Achaemenid territories along the Mediterranean coast, including the former lands of Israel, which, as long as the taxes continued to roll in, he sensibly allowed to continue much as before. The language of government naturally shifted from Aramaic to Greek and, with an influx of Greeks, Macedonians and Hellenised Phoenicians along the Mediterranean coast, some cities, such as Gaza, Ascalon and Joppa, were significantly expanded and, in some cases, renamed. But away from the coastal plain, very little else changed. In Jerusalem, for instance, the institutions of the High Priest and the Sanhedrin – which had grown and developed in importance under the Achaemenids – continued to exert their influence over the nation’s cultural and religious life and, if anything, actually increased their civic powers.
In fact, it wasn’t until more than a century later, in 198 BC, that things really began to change, when having long since consolidated their control over the rest of the former Achaemenid empire and watched the Ptolemaic dynasty slide into Egyptian decadence, the Seleucids, under Antiochus III, decided to take back what they regarded as rightfully theirs and embarked upon a military campaign which they were able to prosecute with remarkable if wholly predictable ease. For unlike the Ptolemies, who, in the bounteous land of the Nile, had very quickly ‘gone native’, the many years of civil war in Persia had forced the Seleucids to maintain the martial values of their Macedonian ancestry: values which they were now intent on imposing upon their latest acquisitions, including the Kingdom of Judah.
In Jerusalem, for instance, bath houses and wrestling schools were built by royal decree, while Jewish youths were forcibly made to participate in athletic games, all of which amounted to the imposition of a culture so alien to Jewish sensibilities that it couldn’t have been more guaranteed to elicit shock, outrage and resistance if these had been the principal Seleucid aims.
To compound the problem further, far from uniting the Jewish people in common opposition – as one might have imagined it would – this deliberate and undisguised strategy of rapid Hellenisation actually led to new social and political divisions within Jewish society, with two new political parties being formed. The first of these was the Seduqim, or Sadducees: a group which was largely made up of the hereditary priesthood and which therefore held what little power was still vested in Jewish hands, making them disposed to accommodate their imperial masters rather than have this power stripped away from them. Unfortunately, their policy of appeasement immediately drew the opposition of a second grouping known as the Perusim, or Pharisees, which was largely comprised of scholars and teachers, whose insistence on the strict interpretation of Judaic law led them to oppose any form Hellenisation in any way they could, but which largely came down to inciting public protests and disorder, to which the province’s Seleucid Satrap predictably responded with customary Macedonian brutality.
This, however, merely escalated the already rapidly accelerating cycle of violence, which culminated in 169 BC when the newly crowned son of Antiochus III, Antiochus IV, visited Jerusalem to resolve the situation. This he decided to do, however, by confiscating all the gold ornaments in the Temple, which, again quite predictably, led to riots all across the city, to which Antiochus then responded by banning the practice of Judaism altogether and rededicating the Temple to Olympian Zeus, thereby precipitating an all-out armed rebellion, which, somewhat ironically perhaps, was initially led by a priest called Mattathias of the house of Hasmon.
As it turned out, Mattathias died within the first year of fighting, but he was succeeded by his third son, Yehuda or Judas, a young man of considerable military talent, who having achieved early victories at the battles of Beth-Horon and Emmaus, very quickly earned for himself the honorific title of ‘Maccabeus’, from the Aramaic word ‘maqqaba’, meaning ‘hammer’. For the next six years, he then led a successful guerrilla campaign, liberating Jerusalem and most of Kingdom of Judah until, in 160 BC, he was finally cornered and forced to fight a pitched battle against a much larger Seleucid army at a place called Elasa, where he was defeated and killed.
Leadership of the revolt then passed to his brother, Yohanan, a man of very different character, who is often referred to as ‘the dissembler’ or, slightly less insultingly, as ‘the diplomat’. For in addition to continuing his brother’s guerrilla campaign, he also forged successful alliances with both the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ptolemy VI, and a rival claimant to the Seleucid throne, Alexander Balas. And it was this latter relationship which ultimately brought the revolt to an end, when, in 150 BC, Balas defeated the then king, Demetrius II, and, in return for Yohanan’s support, granted the Kingdom Judah independence.
Thus, for the first time in over four hundred years, there was now, once again, a sovereign Jewish state. At this point, however, it merely comprised the Kingdom of Judah, which, at that time, was barely larger than the occupied territories of the West Bank today. As internal divisions within the Seleucid empire continued to grow, however, they inevitably began to diminish the empire’s ability to ward off external threats, especially in the east where the Parthians – a newly arrived people from the grasslands of central Asia – were making steady inroads into Seleucid territory, thereby presenting Yohanan Maccabeus’ successor, Yohanan Hyrcanus, with an opportunity to expand his own tiny realm.
Nor was he alone in this ambition, being particularly encouraged in his expansionist plans by a newly formed and ultra-nationalist Judaic sect known as the Essenes. Ironically, this sect had actually been formed soon after 150 BC in protest against the fact that, when Yohanan Maccabeus crowned himself king of his newly independent kingdom, he also assumed the role of High Priest, even though he had no right to this hereditary position, not being of the House of Tzadok. This has consequently led many scholars to suspect that the founder of the sect – whose name is not known and who only ever refers to himself in his writings as the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ – was very probably the next in line for the High Priest’s position and regarded it as having been stolen from him. Consistent with this theory, he certainly had a large retinue of followers, many of whom accompanied him into self-imposed exile in the desert near the Dead Sea, where they built a sanctuary called Ir-Tsadok B’Succaca – meaning ‘The House of Tzadok at the Wadi Succaca’ – from where the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’ then wrote a series of diatribes against the new king – referring to him as the ‘Wicked Priest’ – a number of which still survive today, having been found among the collection of documents known as the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’, which were discovered hidden in caves above Qumran in the 1950s, and which almost certainly comprised the sanctuary’s library.
Given such a history, one might therefore be forgiven for wondering why this sect should have supported the Wicked Priest’s nephew, Yohanan Hyrcanus. The name ‘Essene’, however – or Yishai’im in Hebrew – is derived from the name of King David’s father, Jesse or Yishai, which also relates to one of the sect’s most central beliefs: that the End of Days and the coming of the Kingdom of God could only occur when the whole of King David’s Unified Kingdom was restored to Judaic rule. This they further believed could only happen, however, after forty years of war, conducted both on earth and in heaven, during which the Sons of Light – namely themselves – would put the Forces of Darkness to the sword, the choice of terminology here quite clearly demonstrating just how deeply the dualistic cosmology of Zoroastrianism had penetrated Judaic thinking by this time.
What is really significant about this apocalyptic vision, however, is the fact that the earthly dimension of this war was to led by a far more traditionally Judaic figure: that of a mashiach or messiah, a religious warrior whose traditional description almost perfectly fitted Yohanan Hyrcanus. For not only had the young king inherited the position of High Priest from his uncle – along with the crown – but when Yohanan Maccabeus died, it seems that any alliance or sense of mutual obligation which may have previously existed between the Seleucid Empire and the Kingdom of Judah died with him. I say this because almost as soon as Yohanan Hyrcanus was crowned, the then Seleucid king, Antiochus VII, marched an army into Judah, pillaged the countryside and laid siege to Jerusalem, which Hyrcanus was eventually forced to surrender in order to avoid the mass starvation of its population. The real significance of these events, however, is that one of the terms of this surrender was that Hyrcanus had to lead a Judean army east to help the Seleucids defend their own territory against the Parthians: something which he appears to have accomplished with astonishing precocity, being largely responsible in at least temporarily halting the Parthian advance, thereby proving himself as formidable a soldier as his uncle Yehuda.
Having gained both a reputation as a military commander and a strong sense of grievance from these experiences, once back in Jerusalem he was thus now both ready and eager to embrace the Essenes’ messianic vision of reconquering King David’s Unified Kingdom, not just to get back at the Seleucids for their bad faith, but also, one suspects, because, having fought the Parthians, himself, and witnessed the effectiveness of their heavy cavalry, known as cataphracts, he very likely knew that they would eventually prevail, and that he therefore needed to strengthen his own position by expanding his borders and increasing the population from which he could draw military support.
In 113 BC, he therefore set out on the first of a series of campaigns of conquest, starting with an attack on Samaria to the north, which, like the Kingdom of Judah, had managed to retain much of its ancient Jewish population during nearly seven hundred years of Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid and Seleucid rule, and which should therefore have made the Samaritans one of Judah’s natural allies. That it did not was due to the fact that when the Babylonians had destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 597 BC, the Samaritans decided to build a temple of their own on Mount Gerizim, which Judean Jews regarded as an abomination. As a result, Hyrcanus’ campaign against Samaria was probably the most atrocity-filled of his entire military career. Not only did he destroy the temple on Mount Gerizim but he took thousands of Samaritans into captivity as punishment, not just for their entirely natural resistance to his hegemony but for their supposed ancient crimes.
In an even greater display of his ruthlessness, he also instituted a policy of compelling the non-Jewish population of any territory he conquered to convert to Judaism: a policy which he implemented by recruiting an army of priests to carry out forcible circumcisions if necessary. This they did with ever growing frequency and brutality during his next two campaigns, the first of which began in 110 BC and was directed against an area on the east bank of the Jordan which, in the time of King David, had been the ancient Kingdom of Moab. The second, which probably started two to three years later, was even more extensive, encompassing what was to become the entire province of Idumaea – formerly the Kingdom of Edom – which, while largely consisting of desert, had a population at least as large as that of the Kingdom of Judah, itself, and which meant that by the time of the campaign’s completion – and within a period of less than ten years since Hyrcanus first marched into Samaria – the world’s Jewish population had more than doubled
With the largest part of the job done, in 104 BC, he then turned north once again, to Samaria’s northern border, where the final piece of the jigsaw that would reconstitute King David’s Unified Kingdom lay: Galilee. And it was here, on the threshold of fulfilling what he must have believed was his destiny as the mashiach, that he promptly died, thereby not only demonstrating how fickle fate can be, but very probably doing more to prepare the ground for the birth of Christianity than any other Jewish leader.
Not, of course, that anyone could have known this at the time. It was just one of those rocks which history occasionally starts tumbling and which eventually turns into a landslide. Moreover, what really started the avalanche wasn’t actually Hyrcanus’ death, but rather the fact that neither of his successors, Aristobulus I and Alexander Jannaeus, continued their father’s practice of forcing the populations of conquered territories to convert to Judaism: a change in policy which was actually brought about as a result of domestic political pressure, especially from the Pharisees, who not only questioned the legality of forcible conversions, but voiced considerable alarm at the effect which, by this time, they were having on Judaism’s very integrity. For while, as a religion and way of life – as opposed to an ethnic identity – Judaism had always accepted converts, or gerim as they were called, due to the level of commitment and sacrifice these conversions required, in the past they had always been relatively rare, and celebrated for this very fact. After nearly ten years of forcible conversions, however, not only were gerim beginning to outnumber ancestral Jews, but having been forced to convert, their observance of Judaic law was often perfunctory at best, thereby not only weakening Jewish identity, but creating a kind of two-tier system in which calling someone a ger was rapidly becoming a term of abuse.
Worse still, this widening of the distinction between gerim and ancestral Jews was soon to be the cause of one of the most catastrophic developments in the history of Jewish nationalism, when, after the death of Alexander Jannaeus, two of his sons, Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II – each supported by one of the two main political parties – went to war in pursuit of their rival claims to the throne, thereby attracting the attention of the Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, who was in the region campaigning against the Parthians at the time, and who saw the siblings’ rivalry as a perfect opportunity for Rome to gain some level of patronage and influence over the young Jewish kingdom. After years of subsequently trying to mediate between the two brothers, however – during which time there were several coups and counter-coups and one occasion on which one of the brothers deliberately disfigured the other so as to make him ineligible to become High Priest – the Emperor Augustus finally gave up on the Hasmonean dynasty altogether and decided to install his own man as king instead. Unfortunately, the chosen candidate, who had boldly presented himself in Rome and offered the Emperor his services, was an ambitious young Edomite called Herod, whose father had been forced to convert to Judaism during Yohanan Hyrcanus’ conquest of their homeland and who was consequently only a second generation Jew, making his imposition on ancestral Jews seem like an act of calculated disrespect.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine a worse start to a relationship than that which the Romans forced on their new Jewish clients, making their eventual falling out more or less inevitable, the Great Jewish Revolt of 66 to 73 AD merely following the same pattern as the Hasmonean revolt of 240 years earlier, with one major difference, of course, that this time the Jews lost: an outcome which thus took them from the height of nationalist success and pride to the depths of humiliating defeat and banishment in little more than a century: a fall made all the more tragic, in the Shakespearean sense of this word, by the fact that they effectively did it to themselves. For without the nationalistic, expansionist policies of the Hasmoneans – and, more specifically of course, Yohanan Hyrcanus’ messianic policy of compulsory conversion – not only would the Romans not have been able to place an Edomite ger on the throne of Judah, but ancestral Jews would not have been so offended by it, and the whole tragedy could have been avoided.
If the policy of forcible conversion was thus ultimately disastrous for both Jewish nationalism and the Jewish people, it is slightly ironic, therefore, that, in the case of Galilee, it was actually the discontinuation of this policy that was the cause of so much trouble. To understand why, however, one may need to set aside certain assumptions, the first of which is the very common assumption that, because Jesus and his family lived there – along with countless other Jews – Jews had always lived there: that it was, in fact, part of the ancestral Jewish homeland.
This assumption, however, is entirely false. For while Galilee may have been part of King David’s Unified Kingdom in the 10th century BC, according to the first book of Kings 9:11, his son, Solomon, actually sold it to King Hiram of Tyre in exchange for the gold and cedar he needed to build his temple, at which point any Jewish presence in the province – which was probably fairly nominal at best and mostly of a military nature – was almost certainly withdrawn. More to the point, in or around 800 BC, the whole area was conquered by the Assyrians who appear to have taken the entire population into captivity in Mesopotamia. We know this because archaeological excavations all across northern Israel have revealed dozens of towns and villages that were simply abandoned at that time, with no new habitations being built there for more than two centuries, until, indeed, the Achaemenids reversed the Assyrian and Babylonian policy of transporting conquered populations into slavery and started ruling them in situ, instead, deriving taxes from their conquests rather than slave labour. This further entailed stationing soldiers in the conquered territories to prevent rebellion and appointing administrators to run them, many of whom would have been rewarded for their service and loyalty by being given land in the provinces they administered, thereby creating a form of colonisation which would have been particularly convenient and attractive in the case of Galilee.
I say this not only because, being severely under-populated, the new rulers of the province would not have had to dispossess the old rulers in order to obtain the land they needed, but also because the land itself had a number of very favourable characteristics. For not only is Galilee centred on a fresh water lake, teaming with fish, but the lake, itself, misnamed the ‘Sea of Galilee’, is situated in the crater of an extinct volcano, which means that it is surrounded on all sides by mineral-rich volcanic soil, perfect for growing all kinds of fruit and vegetables but more especially grapes for making wine, meaning that any Achaemenid soldier or administrator who was gifted land in Galilee was richly rewarded indeed.
What’s more, both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids appear to have continued this practice of gradual colonisation. And while, under the Ptolemies, immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean mostly settled in the coastal plain, it is clear from the names of some of Jesus’ disciples that Galilee was also an attractive destination for Greek settlers. I say this because although the canonical gospels were all written in Greek, with the result that all the names in them are Hellenised – the most obvious being that of Jesus, himself, whose given name in Hebrew was almost certainly Yeshua – there are some names in the gospels which have no Hebrew equivalents, suggesting that the Greek names were actually the names by which these disciples were known. The most obvious of these is Andrew or Andreas, for which there isn’t even anything similar in Hebrew. Less obvious but even more telling is the name Bartholomew, which is actually a corruption of the patronymic ‘bar Ptolemy’, meaning ‘son of Ptolemy’, thereby suggesting a Hellenic Egyptian ancestry.
Nor are the linguistic consequences of successive waves of colonisation only to be found in the given names of the province’s inhabitants. The effects of changes in ownership are even more prominent in successive changes to place names. A good example is the archaeological site which currently bears the name Khirbet Kerak, which is situated at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee, where it empties out into the River Jordan, and which means ‘ruined fort’, after the succession of fortresses that were constructed on the site over at least fifteen centuries, the first of which was probably built by Artaxerxes II in the early 4th century BC to guard a bridge across the river. Unfortunately, we do not know what it was actually called at that time. What we do know, however, is that, under the Ptolemies, the fortress was greatly expanded and renamed Philoteria, after Ptolemy II’s wife. Then, when Galilee was finally conquered by Alexander Jannaeus in 103 BC, the name was changed once again, to Beth Yerah, meaning ‘House of the Moon’.
If these name changes give one a sense of the cultural revolution which accompanied each successive conquest, however, they still barely scratch the surface of what was really going on in the province. For of far greater significance was the structure of the society which was gradually accreted by this colonisation process, with each new set of conquerors displacing their predecessors as the ruling elite and forcing those below them one rung lower on the social ladder, with the result that, by the time the Jews arrived, the social structure was already highly stratified.
On the bottom rung were the Achaemenid Persians – although, after four hundreds of settlement in the province, they probably didn’t call themselves that or think of themselves in this way. Indeed, it’s far more likely that they either regarded themselves as the only true Galileans or identified more with their religion as that which most clearly distinguished them from the various Hellenic groups which had successively descended upon them. Consistent with Aramaic still being the dominant language in the province, however, it is also likely that, having arrived when the province was still largely uninhabited, and having had two hundred years to colonise it before anyone else got there, they would still have comprised the largest part of the population. Having been dispossessed by two successive waves of Greeks, on the other hand, it is also very likely that, by 103 BC, they would have become the poorest section of the population, having been reduced to peasant farmers and the urban poor.
Not that the first wave of Greeks are likely to have been particularly rapacious in their acquisition of the land. For being Satrap of Egypt at the time of Alexander the Great’s death, Ptolemy didn’t actually have to take the province by force; he merely reached out and extended his administrative control over it, along with a number of other neighbouring provinces, while his brother generals were fighting each other in the north. Apart from gifts of land to his appointed governors and army chiefs, therefore, most of the inward settlement during the Ptolemaic period would have been by Hellenic peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, who were likely to have been ordinary working people, themselves, whose status, even in the eyes of the new rulers, would not therefore have been much above that of the existing population.
It was only therefore when the Seleucids arrived, taking the province by force and, in so doing, demonstrating both their martial and moral superiority, that the really oppressive consequences of being conquered would have been felt, not so much by the Seleucids’ Hellenic predecessors – who, at least, shared their new rulers’ language and culture – but certainly by the Achaemenid Persians, who are likely to have suffered all the more because, even after two hundred years of aggressive Hellenisation in both Persia and Mesopotamia, the Seleucids had abjectly failed to supplant Zoroastrianism in its native lands, thus almost certainly making its discovery in far-flung corners of the former Achaemenid empire all the more irksome.
Given the inherent superiority of Zoroastrianism over the gods of Olympus, however, it’s hard to imagine that the Galilean Mazdayasni would have been any more willing to give up their religion than their coreligionists in Persia. Thus, when the Jews arrived some eighty-odd years later, they very probably found a native population that was sorely oppressed but still largely unbowed, and still worshipping Ahura Mazda.
It was at this point, however, that their problems really began. For even though Hyrcanus’ policy of forcible conversion may have been discontinued – thus making Jewish occupation slightly more relaxed than the regime of aggressive Hellenisation that had preceded it – not only did the rich Galilean soil still prove a powerful lure, especially to Jews from the barren uplands of Judea, but there were still many Jews keen to pursue the messianic vision of reoccupying King David’s Unified Kingdom, the most prominent of whom, of course, were the Essenes, who now built a second sanctuary in the foothills of Mount Carmel, at the northwest end of a broad flat-bottomed valley which had previously been known as the Vale of Megiddo, but which was now renamed the Vale of Ysre’el (modern day Jezreel), where many Jewish immigrants settled in towns like Japha, Cana and Nazareth, displacing the natives and making themselves rich by exporting the province’s fine wines all over the land of Israel and beyond.
Thus, far from simplifying the social structure of the province by making everyone Jewish, as the policy of forcible conversion had done elsewhere, the Jewish conquest of Galilee simply added yet another layer to the social pyramid. Worse still, the new elite was not one that was interested in any form of integration with those they had dispossessed and may well have been positively hostile to the non-Jewish population. For driven by their eschatological desire for the End of Days, it is more than likely that there were many ancestral Jews who saw the existence of non-Jews in Galilee as an impediment to their goal, making it also very likely, therefore, that, although the policy of forcible conversion had been abandoned – and notwithstanding the fact that, by this time, gerim were already beginning to be held in low esteem – considerable economic and social pressure would have been put on these goyim to convert.
In fact, we can be fairly sure of this. For according to the Jewish historian Josephus, by the beginning of the first century AD, when the new provincial capital of Tiberias was being built on the western shore of the lake, up to half of the Galilean population refused to have anything to do with its construction on the grounds that there had previously been a cemetery on the site, making trespass upon it anathema to all Jews, the implication being, therefore, that, by this point – a little over a century after its conquest – nearly half the population of the province was Jewish: something which it is hard to imagine could have been achieved through settlement alone.
Thus, yet another stratum in the social hierarchy was created: one which was almost certainly treated with contempt and disdain by those it tried to emulate by joining, while simultaneously being mistrusted and shunned as unprincipled opportunists by those on whom its members had turned their backs.
And if all this wasn’t bad enough, the Romans then took a decision which made it even worse. For when Herod the Great died in 4 BC, instead of choosing one of his four surviving sons as king, they decided instead to divide the kingdom up between the three youngest, the eldest surviving son, Herod Boethus, having been disinherited by his father for having kept secret a plot to poison the old tyrant three years earlier: a plot for which his two elder brothers, Alexander and Aristobulus, along with his mother, Mariamme II, were all in fact executed. This left Archelaus, Antipas and Philip as possible heirs, with the Romans deciding to award Judea and Idumaea to Archelaus, Trachonitis, on the east bank of the Jordan, to Philip, and Galilee to Antipas.
The problem was that, among ancestral Jews, none of the sons were any less loathed than their father, this aversion being especially acute at the heart of the Judaic establishment in Jerusalem, where Archelaus responded to the political opposition of both the Sadducees and the Pharisees – along with the clamorous disaffection of the mob – with a brutality that made the Romans fear open revolt. Sending the young king into exile in Italy, they therefore took the even more disastrous decision to place Judea and Idumaea under direct rule, thereby inciting even more opposition, to which they responded by strictly limiting the number of rabbinical schools allowed in the city, believing them to be the principal locus of insurrection.
All this did, however, was shift the problem elsewhere. For where did all these expelled rabbis go? They went to Tiberias, of course, the fast-growing provincial capital of Galilee, which subsequently became the foremost centre for Judaic scriptural exegesis in the whole of Israel, as well as the new hotbed of revolutionary politics.
Worse still, the imposition of direct rule by the Romans in Judea also gave rise to a new sect: the Kana’im or Zealots, who were founded by a man called Yehuda (Judas) of Galilee, whose base of operations was his own province, outside Roman jurisdiction, where he was able to recruit zealous young ancestral Jews from among the fervently nationalist population of the Vale of Ysre’el and train them to commit acts of sabotage in Judea, especially in Jerusalem, itself, where a subgroup of the sect, known as the Sicarii – after their long, thin-bladed daggers – specialised in the assassination of collaborators. The result was that by the beginning of the 1st century AD, Galilee was in a state very similar to that of Northern Ireland in the 1970s – except probably worse – its ethnic and sectarian divisions, along with the hatred and violence to which they gave rise, very likely magnifying Northern Ireland’s troubles by an order of magnitude.
And it was into this world that Jesus was thus born, very probably to an ancestral Jewish family in the Vale of Ysre’el, who, if the gospel of St. Matthew is to be believed, had very possibly moved there from Bethlehem, albeit somewhat earlier than the evangelist’s narrative would suggest. Given that the young Jesus could recite whole passages of the Tanakh from memory and could almost certainly therefore read, the family is also likely to have been reasonably well off: wealthy enough, that is, to provide him with an education, very possibly sending him to one of the numerous rabbinical schools which were then opening their doors in Tiberias.
This also suggests that he was not his parents’ first or even second son, both of whom would have spent far more of their upbringing preparing to take over the family business – whatever that was – than training to be a scholar. Having been given the time and leisure to study, however, he would have also had time to observe and contemplate the world in which he found himself, especially that of his own class, whose superior station in life, he would have realised, was not the consequence of any inherent merit or even hard work, but merely the result of historical happenstance and a willingness to dispossess others of their property while justifying this theft in terms of scriptural fulfilment and the realisation of a national destiny.
Understanding this, he would have also therefore come to recognise some of the less than beneficial consequences that tend to flow through any society with deeply buried wrongs in its past, not least because those whose power and status have been gained by dubious and even violent means tend to be preternaturally aware of just how precarious their positions are, and are consequently disposed to guard them all the more jealously, insisting on the strict observance of social distinctions which are nearly always discriminatory and oppressive, engendering resentment, bitterness and eventually hatred in those so oppressed. What’s more, such oppression does not end there. For as the young Jesus would have also doubtless noticed, those who are mistreated by those above them have this almost unfailing tendency to take it out on those below them, creating chains of reactive and generally abusive behaviour which are not only self-reinforcing – generating further abusive acts with every link in the chain thus forged – but self-harming, creating a world of misery and unhappiness for everyone.
Like the stoics before him, therefore, he would have eventually come to realise that to make the world a better place, one must first and foremost break these chains of abusive behaviour and that, for this to happen, people had to stop merely reacting to the world and start acting of their own volition, on the basis of moral choice, thereby taking control and exercising prohairesis. Whereas the stoics merely saw this as a necessary condition for making a positive contribution to the world, however, Jesus took it one step further, seeing it as a way of mending the world. For he clearly realised that if it is possible to create vicious circles by visiting upon others the offenses we ourselves receive, then it may be just as possible to create more benign circles through acts of kindness and consideration where none such are expected. All it takes is someone to lead by example: to not be provoked by provocation; to try to defuse anger rather than react to it; and, most importantly of all, to treat everyone, no matter what their status and position in life, with courtesy and respect.
And it was this, of course, that got him killed. For in a world in which courtesy and respect are the sole preserve of those whose authority and status are all that prevents past wrongs from coming back to haunt them, and who insist upon their due all the more vociferously for this very reason, merely treating everyone equally, with the same level of courtesy and respect due to all one’s fellow human beings, is not just an act of sedition, but a personal rebuke. And it was for this reason, therefore, that they could not tolerate his continuing existence: not because he seriously challenged their authority, but because, by his example, he held a mirror up to them and made them see themselves for what they were: a crime made all the more heinous by the fact that he was one of them, an ancestral Jew who could have taken his place among the province’s ruling elite, but who chose instead to consort with tax collectors, prostitutes and, no doubt, gerim.
In fact, in this regard it is somewhat unfortunate that more of the early chroniclers of Christianity weren’t Jews or, if they were, were mostly members of the Jewish diaspora. For had they been more thoroughly steeped in the internal politics of their homeland, they might have thought it sufficiently relevant to tell us just how many of Jesus’ disciples were second or even first generation converts, which in turn would have told us from which part of the Jewish population he largely drew his following. As it is, therefore, we can only guess. Given the history of the Jewish people over the previous three hundred years, however, and the deep sense of national destiny this history had ingrained in them, it is very much to be doubted whether many ancestral Jews would have been persuaded, either morally or politically, by the kind of moral philosophy which Jesus was putting forward. The Jews to whom it would have appealed far more – the ones who rightly felt that they were regarded as second class Jews – were the gerim.
This would also explain why, once Jesus had left them, his disciples didn’t just slide back into their comfortable old lives. For if I’m right, and most of the disciples were indeed gerim – think of Andreas and bar Ptolemy – they simply wouldn’t have had much in the way of ‘comfortable old lives’ to slide back into. For given the status of gerim as neither really Jew nor gentile, apart from their own families, it is hard to imagine that there was any kind of community waiting to welcome them home. Nor, I suspect, would they have had much appetite for the familiar routines and traditional observances of Jewish daily life which, had they been ancestral Jews, might have served to ease them back into the world they had left behind. For Judaism had rejected them – not once but twice – with the result that the idea of going back to it may well have been so unpalatable as to be unthinkable.
Not, of course, that continuing along the road which Jesus had set out for them was ever going to be easy either, especially if it entailed continuing to disseminate their leader’s teachings, as I suspect it did. For trying to live by the precepts of a new and radical moral philosophy without, at the same time, advocating them and thus creating a practicing community in which these precepts could be shared and reinforced, would have been almost as difficult as continuing to spread these precepts without the presence of their author to provide them with inspiration and direction. Apart from having to do it all on their own, however, the disciples’ biggest problem would have almost certainly been the fact that, unlike in the Greco-Roman world, where a tradition of secular philosophy had already existed for more than five hundred years, in the Judaic world, all such learning and debate was embedded within the institutions of a national religion, the authority of which was derived from scripture, which ultimately came from God. Thus it was that the disciples had a choice: they either had to base their teachings on this same authority – which was rather difficult, given that the Judaic establishment had just had the author of those teachings executed – or they had to build a new authority upon the person of Jesus, himself: on ‘who’ or, more importantly, ‘what’ he was.
Nor was this simply a matter of claiming some kind of divine status for him, or even adducing evidence to support this claim – something to which I shall return shortly. For if Jesus were divine, not only did his incarnation in human form have to have some purpose, but this purpose had to be grounded within a theological cosmology to which the disciples’ audience could relate: one which, as explained earlier, had to both make sense of why we are here and chart a way forward to something better.
And it is in this regard that the disciples would have had their biggest problem, not with respect to the question as to why we are here on earth, with a sentence of death hanging over our heads – for in the story of Adam and Eve, Judaism already had an answer that made perfect sense and would have been familiar to Jews and non-Jews alike – but with respect to the life yet to come. For within Judaism, this was defined as the resurrection the body at the End of Days, which, given the difficulty Jews were having reconstituting King David’s Unified Kingdom, was a date more or less indefinitely postponed. Besides which, it would have tied Christianity to Jewish nationalism, which would not have appealed greatly to disaffected gerim or, indeed, anyone other than ancestral Jews, who were not particularly open to the new religion anyway. There was no way, therefore, that the disciples could have put forward this Judaic vision as any part of what they were offering, especially when there was an alternative readily available to them that would have been familiar to all Galileans – and, indeed, to almost all inhabitants throughout the Middle East – in the Zoroastrian vision of heaven and hell.
However it happened, a union was consequently forged between the Judaic account of our expulsion from paradise and the Zoroastrian description of our two possible future destinations, thereby creating a new Christian cosmology, different from either of its antecedents. The problem was that, in bringing these two elements together from two different traditions, Christianity effectively created a moral universe that was worse than any that had ever preceded it. Not only was it worse than the Epicurean universe, in which the forces of nature are merely indifferent to our fate, and the Olympian universe, where the gods simply use us for sport, it was even worse than the Zoroastrianism universe in which eternal damnation awaited those who failed to make it across the sifting bridge. In fact, the new Christian moral universe was the worst moral universe imaginable. For according to the doctrine of original sin, being human and being driven by human needs and desires, we are, by definition, born in sin, to live in sin and thence die in sin. Indeed, it was the sin of being human that got us expelled from paradise in the first place, which means that, unless something were to happen to alter our human condition between birth and death, we are hardly likely to get back into paradise when we die. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this, therefore, is that there is only one place we are going and that is straight to hell, where we are going to spend the rest of eternity in torment and suffering.
Thus, if Zoroastrianism had a problem with not knowing how high the bar was set for getting into heaven, Christianity now had the problem of knowing all too well how high the bar was set: so high, in fact, that no human being, except the purist of saints perhaps, was ever going to be admitted. And if this had been all that Christianity had had to offer, it is fairly unlikely that it would have ever had any takers. It overcame this obstacle, however – and, indeed, made a virtue of it – by adding to two further theological ingredients of its own: one largely derived from Judaism but significantly transformed, the other entirely unique to itself. These were forgiveness and faith.
Importantly, both of these terms had very specific meanings within early Christianity which subtly differ from modern usage. Today, for instance, we take the term ‘forgiveness’ to refer to the attitude or state of mind of the person doing the forgiving. It does nothing to alter the nature of the offence being forgiven. The offence is not even erased from memory. Which is why we sometimes try to strengthen the term by talking about ‘forgiving and forgetting’. Even then, however, it is not eradicated from history: it still happened.
This was not so, however, in the case of the ‘forgiveness of sins’ in either Judaism or early Christianity, where the sins were literally expunged or wiped clean: a difference in meaning which is absolutely vital to our understanding of those passages in the gospels which describe Jesus as touring the country, forgiving people their sins and healing the sick. For while most people today would probably think that ‘forgiving people their sins’ and ‘healing the sick’ were two different things, to Jews at that time, they would have been considered as one and the same. This is because Jews in the 1st century AD believed that any illness or affliction was a punishment from God for their sins. In order to be cured or healed, therefore, they first had to have the sin expunged. In fact, the wiping clean of the sin was, itself, regarded as the cure.
Moreover, Judaism actually had a procedure for achieving this. As set out in the Book of Numbers 6:1-21, the penitent patient had to take what is known as the vow of ‘separation’ (nazir), which required him to abstain from such practices as drinking wine, cutting his hair and visiting graves for a minimum period of thirty days, though it could also be longer. Indeed, some Nazirites took the vow for life. After following these requirements for the designated period, the Nazirite then had to present himself at the Temple, where he had to make three sacrificial offerings, after which his head and beard were shaved and his whole body was immersed in a plunge-pool, or mikvah, as an act of ritual purification.
What is totally remarkable about Jesus touring the country, forgiving people their sins and healing the sick, therefore, is that the crowds who came to hear him speak clearly believed that he could achieve this same result by immersing the lame and sick in the waters of the Sea of Galilee or the River Jordan. Indeed, the only thing I can think of that is more remarkable than this is the fact that most Christians do not appear to realise just how remarkable it is. ‘Why shouldn’t the people have believed that he could wash away their sins and heal them?’ they ask. ‘After all, he was the Son of God!’ This, however, is almost certainly to reverse the actual line of reasoning which most people who were there would have followed. For it wasn’t that they believed that he could forgive them their sins because they believed he was the Son of God; it was rather that they were willing to entertain the possibility that he was the Son of God because they believed that he could forgive them their sins, the evidence for which lay in the fact that at least some of the people who underwent this ritual of purification were at least temporarily cured of their afflictions, such being the power of belief which such miracles, themselves, inspired.
Having thus established that this man – or whatever he was – could forgive people their sins and potentially, therefore, overcome the obstacle of our sinfulness in attaining an everlasting life that didn’t involve fire and torture, the only question that remained, therefore, was what we had to do to deserve such saving grace. And apart from living our lives by the moral precepts which he taught, what was also quite extraordinary was that the answer didn’t appear to be very much. We simply had to believe in him and have faith that he would do this for us. Moreover, this state of ‘having faith’ was nowhere near as difficult to achieve as many Christian theologians have since tried to make it seem, most notably by reducing it to the intellectual exercise of believing something without evidence or reason: something which, by definition, therefore, is irrational and therefore somewhat difficult for most rational beings to accomplish. Not only does this over-intellectualise the concept of ‘faith’, however, it also ignores the very attributes of faith which made it – and hence Christianity – so attractive. For at heart, Christian faith is both a state of trust and an act of surrender, a bit like the faith we show in others when we allow ourselves to fall over backwards, trusting that the person behind us will catch us. The only difference is that, in the case of Christian faith, it is not just one’s dignity and physical comfort one entrusts to another, but one’s immortal soul, which, in some ways, makes it a little disconcerting. In other ways, however, it is also a kind of relief. For by putting ourselves entirely in another’s hands, we are also letting go, giving up the struggle to solve the problems life of death on our own and acknowledging that we cannot live with the knowledge of our own inevitable demise without the help of someone else to hold our hand and see us safely through to the other side. And it is in this, I believe, that the appeal of Christian faith ultimately resides: the assurance that there is someone there to hold us and that we are not alone; an idea which it is really not that difficult to understand and certainly not difficult to embrace.
Indeed, it is the very simplicity of this central requirement – to have faith – rather than any deep mystery, that is surely one of the main reasons for Christianity’s success: that and the fact that having created the worst possible moral universe, not only did it then provide a solution in the promise of forgiveness, it also gave people precisely what we all most fundamentally crave: the unconditional love of someone who will save us.
It also solved the fundamental problem of Zoroastrianism. For while the Mazdayasni could never be sure that Vohu Manah was going to usher them safely into the House of Song, on the basis of their faith, Christians know with absolute certainly that Christ will welcome them into His Father’s House: another distinct source of appeal which made it highly likely, therefore, that the Mazdayasni of Galilee and the other Roman provinces of the Middle East would have been among the first converts to this new religion. In fact, it is like that Christianity would have spread eastward far more fluently than it spread westward had not the Parthians reinstated Zoroastrianism as the Persian Empire’s official religion and made it difficult for western travellers to cross their borders, establishing fortified cities and other strongholds all along the north bank of the Euphrates so as to match the military installations which the Romans were simultaneously building on the south bank of the river.
And so the new religion turned west instead, making use of good Roman roads and the well-trafficked trade routes of the Mediterranean to quickly spread throughout a multicultural Empire whose official Olympian religion offered little in the way of any solution to the perennial problem of death and which thus provided Christianity with the fertile soil it needed to grow. As a consequence, it was Christianity, far more than Greek philosophy, which therefore went on to shape European civilization, and it was Christianity, as I shall further argue in Part II of this essay, that also made this civilization such a success.
Indeed, without Christianity – and the institutions to which it gave rise – it is questionable whether European civilization would have spread around the world in the way that it did. The problem was that the very characteristics which made both Christianity and European civilization so successful, particularly Christianity’s Judaic-Zoroastrian cosmology – which became far more deeply embedded in European culture than either of the religion’s two saving graces: forgiveness and faith – also held within them the seeds of Christianity’s own decline, which, while leaving western civilization with a Christian cultural legacy, is now having a deleterious effect upon that civilization itself, causing it, in fact, to self-destruct, the reasons for which I shall endeavour to explain in ‘Death, Original Sin and the End of Western Civilization (PartII)’.
