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That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman
The Jews, unlike their rulers, did not believe that a man might become a god; they believed that there was only the one almighty, eternal deity.
By ad 400 the cross was ceasing to be viewed as something shameful. Banned as a punishment decades earlier by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had come to serve the Roman people as an emblem of triumph over sin and death.
The artist, a young man from Milan by the name of Caravaggio, had been commissioned to paint a crucifixion: not of Christ himself, but of his leading disciple. Peter, a fisherman who, according to the gospels, had abandoned his boat and nets to follow Jesus, was said to have become the ‘overseer’ – the episcopos or ‘bishop’ – of the first Christians of Rome, before being put to death by Nero.
Peter, the story went, had demanded to be crucified upside down, so as not to share in the fate of his Lord; and Caravaggio, choosing as his theme the very moment when the heavy cross was levered upwards, portrayed the first pope as he had authentically been – as a peasant.
Elsewhere, whether in the lands of Islam, or in India, or in China, there were various understandings of the divine, and numerous institutions that served to define them; but in Europe, in the lands that acknowledged the primacy of the pope, there was only the occasional community of Jews to disrupt the otherwise total monopoly of the Roman Church.
‘Thou hast rebuked the nations, thou hast destroyed the wicked; thou hast blotted out their name for ever and ever.’23 The man who greeted the news of the Japanese surrender in 1945 by quoting scripture and offering up praise to Christ was not Truman, nor Churchill, nor de Gaulle, but the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek.
To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable – indeed the inescapable – influence of Christianity.
Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.
One year on, the bridges were gone. So too were Xerxes’ hopes of conquering Europe. Invading Greece, he had captured Athens; but the torching of the city was to prove the high point of his campaign. Defeat by sea and land had forced a Persian retreat. Xerxes himself had returned to Asia.
In 539 BC, when Babylon was conquered by the Persians, just as Assyria seven decades previously had been conquered by the Babylonians,
Yet Cyrus, when he looked to promote himself as a global ruler, had little option but to look to the heritage of Mesopotamia. Nowhere else in his dominions had offered him a model of kingship so rooted in antiquity, so burnished by self-satisfaction. ‘King of the universe, mighty king, king of Babylon’:8 here were titles that the Persian conqueror had been eager to make his own.
More than any other ruler before him, he was able, by virtue of the sheer immensity of his territorial possessions, to believe himself charged with a universal mission. The word he gave to his empire, bumi, was synonymous with the world.
Even his name, Pseudartabas, was a pointed joke: for just as arta in Persian meant ‘truth’, so did pseudes in Greek mean ‘lying’.
He and his twin sister Artemis, a virgin huntress no less deadly with the bow, were famed for their sensitivity to insult. When a king’s daughter named Niobe boasted of how many more children she had than Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, who had only ever had the two, the twin gods exacted a terrible vengeance. A firestorm of golden arrows felled her sons and daughters. For nine days their corpses lay unburied in their mother’s hall, caked with blood.
A citizen set the task of collating and inscribing the traditions of Athens discovered, to his horror, a long list of sacrifices that everyone had forgotten. The expense of restoring them, so he calculated, would bankrupt the city.
The fate of Troy never ceased to haunt the Greeks. Even Xerxes, arriving at the Hellespont, had demanded to be shown its site.
In Homer’s poetry, the word for ‘pray’, euchomai, was also a word for ‘boast’.
Aristophanes, who was nothing if not competitive himself, did not hesitate to portray them as oafs, or cowards, or liars. In one of his comedies, he even dared to show Dionysus, disguised as a slave, shitting himself as he was threatened with torture, and then being scourged with a whip. The play, like The Acharnians, was awarded first prize.
Law was so dependent on custom as to be indistinguishable from it. With the coming of democracy, though, that assumption was challenged. The right of the people to determine legislation emerged as something fundamental to their authority.
In an earlier tragedy, Antigone, he had portrayed the ultimate doom of Oedipus’ house. The play opened amid the aftermath of civil war. Oedipus’ two sons, fighting over the kingdom, both lay dead before the walls of Thebes. Only one, though, Eteocles, was to be afforded proper burial: for their uncle, Creon, succeeding to the throne, had decreed the second brother, Polynices, to blame for the war, and that as punishment his corpse be left as food for dogs and birds.
Homer and his fellow poets, so the philosopher Xenophanes complained, ‘have attributed to the gods all kinds of things that among humans are shameful and matters of reproach: theft, adultery, deceit’.32 Were cattle only capable of drawing, he scoffed, they would portray their deities as bulls and cows.
Planted where previously there had been nothing but sand and wheeling sea birds, Alexandria rested on shallow foundations. Its gods as well as its citizens were immigrants. Statues of Apollo and Athena stood in the streets alongside those of strange deities with the heads of crocodiles or rams.
Zeno, its founder, had himself arrived in Athens from Cyprus back in 312, when Demetrius of Phaleron was still in power. He and his followers had come to be known – from Zeno’s habit of teaching students in a painted stoa, or colonnade – as ‘Stoics’.
Just as Aristotle had done, they wrestled with the tension between the perfection of a heavenly order governed by mathematical laws and a sublunar realm governed by chance.
Eagles – the battle-standards of the Roman army
Lazio
The Jews, for all that they looked and dressed much like other people, were renowned for their peculiarities. They refused to eat pork. They circumcised their sons. They rested every seventh day, to mark what they termed the Sabbath. Most perversely of all, they refused to pay respects to any god save for the single one they acknowledged as their own.
That Jews might be dogmatic in their eccentric beliefs was something of which Pompey was well aware; for the refusal of his opponents to fight on the Sabbath had greatly eased the task of his engineers in constructing their siege works.
Once, many generations back, when Troy was yet to be founded, and Babylon was still young, a man named Abram had lived in Mesopotamia. There, it was taught by Jewish scholars, he had come by a profound insight: that idols were mere painted stone or wood, and that there existed, unique, intangible and omnipotent, just the single deity. Rather than stay in a city polluted by idolatry, Abram had chosen instead to leave his home, travelling with his wife and household to the land that would one day be called Judaea, but was then known as Canaan.
Jerusalem itself, at the time of the angel’s appearance, had only recently come under Israelite control. The man who had captured the city, a one-time shepherd boy and harpist by the name of David, from a small town called Bethlehem, had risen to become king over the whole of Israel; and now, at the very moment when he had established it as his capital, an angel had been sent to its heights, there to ‘show him the spot where the Temple was to be built’.
Then, in 587 BC, it had been the turn of Judah, the kingdom that took its name from the fourth son of Israel, and of its capital, Jerusalem. The king of Babylon had taken the city by storm. ‘And he burnt the house of the Lord and the house of the king and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great house he burnt in fire.’13 Nothing of the Temple built by Solomon, not its fittings of cypress wood, nor its gilded gates, nor its bronze pillars ornamented with pomegranates, had been spared.
For the vast majority of these, the Temple remained what it had ever been: the central institution of Jewish life. Yet it was not the only one. Had it been, then it would have been hard for Jews settled beyond the Promised Land to remain as Jews for long.
Other peoples too could claim possession of texts from gods – but none were so charged with a sense of holiness, none so attentively heeded, none so central to the self-understanding of an entire people as the collection of writings cherished by Jews as their holiest scripture.
A bare seventy years after Alexander’s death there had begun to emerge in Alexandria large numbers of Jews who struggled to understand the Hebrew in which most of their scriptures were written.
Nothing better illustrated the variety of sources from which these had been spun than the sheer range of names given throughout the Jewish biblia to God: Yahweh, Shaddai, El.
Zeus too, enthroned on the summit of Olympus, presided over a court. Nevertheless, the radiance of his glory had its limits. The other gods on Olympus were not consumed by it. Zeus did not absorb various of their attributes into his own being, and then dismiss their phantasms as demons. How different was the God of Israel!
When, in the very first sentence of Genesis, he was described as creating the heavens and the earth, the Hebrew word for God – Elohim – was tellingly ambiguous. Used throughout Jewish scripture as a singular, the noun’s ending was plural. ‘God’ had once been ‘gods’.
Indeed, had there even been a conquest of Canaan at all? The account preserved by the Jews, which told of a succession of spectacular victories by the general Joshua, narrated the downfall of cities that had either been long abandoned by the time the Israelite invasion was supposed to have occurred, or else were yet to be founded.
The insistence in the Book of Joshua that the Israelites had come as conquerors to Canaan hinted at a nagging and persistent anxiety: that the worship of their god might originally have owed more to Canaanite practice than Jewish scholars cared to acknowledge. Customs they condemned as monstrous innovations – the worship of other gods, the feeding of the dead, the sacrifice of children – were perhaps the very opposite: venerable traditions, compared to which their own evolving cult constituted the novelty.
Elohim himself pronounced their sentence. I said, ‘You are gods; you are all sons of the Most High. But you will die like mere men; you will fall like every other ruler.36 In the council of the heavens, there would henceforward rule only the single God.
In Athens, dread of the Great King’s secret agents had inspired Aristophanes to portray one of them as a giant eye; but in Jewish scripture there was no laughing at the royal spies. They were far too potent, far too menacing, for that.
In Canaan, too, stories were told of how gods had fought with dragons and sea serpents – and thereby demonstrated their worthiness to rule the heavens. Such a conceit was, to the writers of Genesis, a nonsense and a blasphemy; and so it was, in their account of the Creation, that they made sure to specify that Elohim had fashioned, not fought with, the creatures of the deep. ‘And God created the sea monsters.’
Yet Job had never doubted God’s power – only his justice. On that score, God had nothing to say. The Book of Job – written when, for the first time, the existence of a deity both omnipotent and all-just was coming to be contemplated – dared to explore the implications with an unflinching profundity.
For other peoples, with their multitudes of deities, the issue had barely raised its head. After all, the more gods there were in the cosmos, the more explanations there were for human suffering. How, though, to explain it in a cosmos with just a single god?
Moses, so it was recorded at the end of the Torah, had died on the eve of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. Despite having freed the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, and then led them for forty years in the wilderness, he never set foot in the Promised Land. ‘And no man has known his burial place to this day.’
No mention of Moses was to be found in Egypt; no mention of the plagues; no mention of the miraculous parting of the Red Sea. It was as though, outside Jewish scripture, he had never existed. Yet the quality of myth that attached itself to Moses, the degree to which he was – in the words of one scholar – ‘a figure of memory but not of history’,
Legislation was the prerogative of the divine. Repeatedly in Jewish scripture, doubts were expressed as to whether Israel, as God’s people, needed kings at all. ‘The Lord will rule over you.’63
Roman governors, charged with maintaining order in the Empire’s various provinces, wielded a monopoly of violence. Fearsome sanctions were theirs to command: the right to condemn anyone who offended against Rome to be burnt alive, or thrown to wild beasts, or nailed to a cross.
Among Greek intellectuals, the Jews had long been viewed as a nation of philosophers.
Of these, in the great melting pot of the Roman Mediterranean, there were increasing numbers. Most, it was true, opted to lurk on the sidelines of the synagogue, and rest content there with a status not as Jews, but as theosebeis: ‘God-fearers’.
