It is necessary to
understand the remarkable spread of Christianity across the civilized
world. There had been dozens – probably
hundreds – of religions before Christianity; we have seen that there was a kind
of worldwide religious explosion in the 5th century BC. None had achieved the same impact or spread
with the same speed as Christianity. And
this is basically because Christianity was a reaction against Roman
materialism. Roman religion was almost
comically literal mind; they believed, for example, that a vote in the senate
could send their late emperor to the abode of the gods. (It is true that this
is not so different from the Catholic Church’s procedure for
canonization). Roman religion was not
even original; it was simply taken over wholesale from ancient Greece. Roman
literature, Roman art, Roman philosophy, were all superficial. There was nothing in Roman culture that could
appeal to a man of imagination.
Christianity was an expression of a craving for a deeper meaning in
human existence.
The agitator known as Jeshua – or Jesus – of Nazareth was
born in about the 20th year of the reign of Augustus – around 10
BC. Pompey the Great has placed the Jews
under Roman rule in 63 BC and the Jews loathed it. Crassus had plundered the temple. Herod the Great, appointed by the Romans to
rule Judea, was as violent and murderous as any of the later Roman emperors,
and was hated by all the religion factions with the exception of the Hellenized
Sadducees. So the expectation of the
long-awaited Messiah, a warrior-king who would free the Jews from foreign rule,
increased year by year.
The early records of Jesus of Nazareth were so tampered with
by later Christians that it is difficult to form a clear picture of his few
brief years as a teacher and prophet.
Even his physical description was altered; it was reconstructed in the
1920s by the historian Robert Eisler in ‘The
Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist’. Among the documents Eisler used was a
‘wanted notice’ signed by Pontius Pilate, and later quoted by the Jewish
historian Josephus, whose reconstructed
text runs as follows.[i]
“At this time, too, there appeared a certain man of magical
power, if it is permissible to call him man, whom certain Greeks call a son of
God, but his disciples the true prophet, said to raise the dead and heal all
diseases.
“His nature and form were human; a man of simple appearance,
mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high (about five feet),
hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows, so that they
who see him might be affrighted, with
scanty hair with a parting in the middle of the head, after the manner of the
Nairites, and an undeveloped beard.”
This original portrait of Jesus – with a humped back, long
nose, half-bald head and scanty beard – was altered by the later Christians to
read: ‘ruddy skins, medium stature, six feet high, well grown, with a venerable
face, handsome nose, goodly black eyebrows with good eyes so that spectators
could love him, with curly hair the colour of unripe hazel nuts, with a smooth
and unruffled, unmarked and unwrinkled forehead, a lovely read, blue eyes,
beautiful mouth, with a copious beard the same colour as the hair, not long,
parted in the middle, arms and hands full of grace . . '
If the Romans had been coarsened by success and victory, it
could be said that the Jews had been refined by failure and defeat. At about the time the Mediterranean was
undergoing its ordeal by fire at the hands of the ‘sea peoples’, the Hebrews,
who lived in the land of Goshen near the Nile delta, had been enslaved by the
Egyptians. At about the time of the
Trojan War, they were led out of Egypt by Moses and spent hard years wandering
in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula.
Hardship deepened their religious sense; they became a people of one
God, whose laws were based on religious ideals. … Under Joshua, they achieved
victories in the land of Canaan and adopted many of the ways of
Canaanites. Then there was along and
desperate struggle against the Philistines, who were finally conquered by King
David around 1000 BC. But after the death
of Solomon (about 930 BC) there were unsettled times, and two Israelites came
under the brutal Assyrian yoke, and in 705 BC the kingdom of Israel ceased to
exist. After the destruction of Nineveh
(612 BC) the Babylonians became the dominant power in the Middle East, and the
Jews were again dragged into captivity.
They were allowed to return to the ruined city of Jerusalem when Cyrus
of Persia conquered Babylonians (538 BC), but remained under Persian rule for
two centuries. Under the leadership of
the Persian Jew Nehemiah they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and returned to
the old religious ways taught by Moses.
In 332 BC Persian rule was overthrown by Alexander the Great, and for
nine years the Jews were his subjects.
After his death, they again fell under the rule of Egypt. One of Alexander’s generals, Seleucas, had
conquered an empire and founded a dynasty, so from 198 to 168 BC Jews were
ruled by the Seleucids. It was the
attempt of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV to Hellenize Judea and ban the Jewish
religion that led to the revolt of Judas Maccabeus and a brief period of
political freedom. But less than a
century later, Pompey conquered Jerusalem, and the Jews become Roman vassals.
So, over the course of many centuries, the Jews had become
accustomed to war, persecution and a foreign yoke. The Jewish religious impulse was deepened by
adversity. Understandably, it laid
emphasis on pacifism, on gentleness and mercy, on the blessedness of the meek
and humble and the rewards of the next world.
Rabbi Akiba said that the essence of the Mosaic message is to love one’s
neigbour, while Rabbi Hillel stated that the central message of Judaism is to do unto others as
you would have them do unto you..
At the time of Jesus, there were three main religious sects
in Judea: the Sadducees who were
conservatives, the zealots who were
revolutionaries, and the Pharisees
who occupied the middle ground. There was also a powerful group known as the Essenes, who might be called
‘withdrawalists’. They founded their own
communities, where they lived pious and abstentious lives. In 1947, some of the scriptures of the
Essenes came to light in caves on the
shores of the Dead Sea – where the Essenes had once lived. These Dead Sea
scrolls revealed that the Essenes called themselves the Elect of God, that they
initiated new members through baptism, and that they had a protocol for seating
that resembles that of the Last Supper described in the New Testament. John the Baptist was almost certainly one of
the Essenes. And the Dead Sea scrolls
make it clear that Jesus was heavily influenced by them.
So, the doctrines we now associate with Jesus were familiar
in the Jewish world for centuries before his arrival. Judaism already forbade men to hate their
enemies. This carpenter’s son from Nazareth,
who began to preach in the twenty-eighth year of his life, went a step further
and declared that we should also love our enemies, and that if someone strikes
us on one check, we should turn the other.
Upto the time of Roman occupation, this must have seemed to most people
sheer stupidity. This pacifistic doctrine can have had no wide appeal in 20
A.D., the sixth year of the reign of Tiberius, though Jesus’s personal
magnetism seems to have been remarkable.
The answer which emerges from contemporary documents is that Jesus
taught that some immense, catastrophic change was about to take place: in fact,
the end of the world. The kingdom of God
was at hand. There would be wars and rumours of wars, famines and earthquakes. The
dead would be brought back to life. The sun would be turned into darkness and
the moon to blood, and stars would fall from heaven. All this would not be at
some vague date in future centuries, but within the lifetime of people then
alive. Accordingly, it would be better
for the faithful to take no thought for the morrow.
The teachings of this apocalyptic preacher offended Pharisees, Sadducees and Zealots
alike. The Zealots had no patience with this preaching about ‘kingdom come.’
The Sadducees were inclined to
Hellenism and disbelieved in life after death; for them Jesus was an
uncultivated fanatic. The Pharisees were the Temple party and
stood for strict observance of every minor religious ritual. The result is that Jesus had few real
supporters during his lifetime. He was a
minor and rather unpopular prophet; if he had lived to be seventy and died in
his bed, he would probably now be totally forgotten.
But after four years of preaching, Jesus rode into Jerusalem
on a donkey and proclaimed himself the Messiah, the savior who had been awaited
for centuries. This made him suddenly
dangerous to the Jewish establishment. Accordingly, he was arrested and taken
before the high priest. Caiaphas has come off rather badly in
the history books, but he cannot really be blamed for what followed. When asked
if he was the Messiah, Jesus replied in the affirmative. Caiaphas
was understandably outraged, for it must have seemed obvious to him that
nothing was less likely than that this unprepossessing little man with his
hump-back and straggly beard could be the man destined to lead the Jews to
freedom. He called Jesus a blasphemer and sent him off to Pilate to be judged. But Pilate was a cultured Roman, and when he
asked Jesus the same question, Jesus was cautious enough to reply only ‘You
have said so.’ Pilate had been a
weary spectator of the endless religious squabbles of the Jews for years. He no doubt resented the attempt of Caiaphas to make him the executioner of
this gentle-looking little man. He tried to get Jesus released – mercy was
shown to a condemned man every Passover – but the people, who were as clamorous
as a Roman mob, said they would prefer another rebel called Barabbas, who at least had tried to kill
a Roman guard. Pilate gave way. He decided
this Jesus was to be crucified
between the two other victims. And so,
like thousands of other victims of Rome, Jesus of Nazareth died on the
cross.
But how did Jesus go on to conquer the world after his
insignificant death. The reasons are
complex. The most important is undoubtedly that soon after his death his
disciple claimed to have seen him again, and actually touched him. One historian, Hugh Schonfield, argued in his
The Passover Plot (1966) that Jesus
was probably given a drug that made him appear to be dead when taken from the
cross by giving a good bribe to the Roman centurion. In another controversial book, published in
1982 (The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and
Richard Leigh). Henry Lincoln also suggested the drug hypothesis; and he went
further to cite a secret Rosicrucian tradition that Jesus was married, and left
Judea with Mary Magdalene to live out the remainder of his life in Gaul (now
xxx xxxx), where his descendants became
the Mrovingian kings. Skeptics may feel
that the explanation could be altogether simpler, and that the whole story of
the Resurrection was invented by the followers of Jesus. Whatever the
explanation, it is certain that stories of Jesus’s miraculous revival after
death were circulating soon after the crucifixion.
Nothing spreads faster than tales of the marvelous; and this undoubtedly explains why Jesus’s
death on the cross only made his name more potent than ever. At this early
stage there were two distinct groups of disciples. The Nasoraeans, or Messianists, were the
original followers, who believed that Jesus was a political Messiah who would
lead the Jews to freedom. He was still
alive, and would in due course reappear to fulfill his promises. They most emphatically did not believe that
Jesus was a god in any sense of the word – this would have been contrary to all
Jewish religious teaching. The other
group, called Christians, were followers of Paul as much as of Jesus. Within a
few years of the crucifixion, this Paul, who loathed the Messianists, had
undergone a sudden conversion. Paul
created a new version of Messianism that was far more strange and mystical than
that of the Nasoraeans. Paul’s Jesus was
the son of God, who had been sent to earth to save men from the consequences of
Adam’s sin. All men had to do was to
believe in Jesus and they were ‘saved’.
And when the end of the world occurred – as it was bound to do within
the next few years, according to Jesus – these Christians would live on an
earth transformed into paradise.
The Messianists and the Christians detested one another with
the peculiar virulent loathing that seemed to characterize Jewish religious
controversies. Paul’s version won through a historical accident. The Jews broke
into open rebellion just before the end of the reign of Nero. Nero sent his
general Vespasian to subdue them. But in the year after Nero’s suicide, Rome
had four emperors who succeeded one after another as a result of rebellions and
killings. Vespasian, the new emperor
sent his son Titus to subdue the Jewish rebels.
Titus subdued the Jews rebellion with Roman brutality and
ruthlessness. After a six month siege,
the temple was buried, the Zealots massacred, more than a million, and the
treasures of the Temple were carried back to Rome. The Messianists were among
those who were slaughtered. Paul’s
Christian, who were scattered all over the place, were the only followers of
Jesus left
.
Any Messianists who remained must certainly have felt that this Christianity of
Paul was a blasphemous travesty of the teachings of their Messiah; and in a literal sense they were correct. Whether Jesus was Jewish by nationality or
not (Galilee contained more Arabs than Jews) he was undoubtedly a Jew by
religion, and as such would have been horrified at the notion that he was a
god. Bernard Shaw once suggested that Jesus
went insane at some later point in his career – when he became convinced
he was the Messiah. Jesus statement that
he could forgive sins suggests that he believed he was in some kind of direct
communication with God. Christians
believe that this was true; but it seems clear that Jesus also believed that
the end of the world was about to occur,
and if he believed that this was also a message from God, he was
mistaken. By modern standards, Jesus was
suffering from delusions.
Jews in the time of Jesus were much preoccupied with the
question of how, if God is good, He could have made so much misery and
suffering. The answer of the rabbis, of course, was that Adam had sinned, and
so been expelled from Eden. Now Paul, in
one stroke, had added an amazing new dimension to Judaism, saying that Jesus
had vicariously atoned for the sins of mankind; after Armageddon, Jesus
followers would live forever.
This new version of Christianity appealed to gentiles as
much as Jews. Any one of any sensitivity
only had to look at the Rome of the era of Jesus to understand just what Paul
meant about the fall of man. In the environ of debauchery, prostitution, Roman
brutality, materialism and licentiousness, Christianity sounded a deeper note;
it offered a vision of meaning and purpose, a vision of seriousness. For strong, it was a promise of new heights
of awareness. For weak, it was a message
of peace and reconciliation, of rest for the weary, of reward for the
humble. And for everyone, it promised an
end to the kingdom of Caesar, with its crucifixion, floggings and arbitrary
executions. The Christians hoped it was
a promise of the end of the world.
Recognizing that the empire was now too big and too chaotic
for one man to govern, Rome returned to the serious business of conspiracy and
assassination. In seventy years there
were more than seventy emperors or would-be emperors. This high turnover was due to the fact that
the army was now the only real power, and if the soldiers took a dislike to an
emperor, they killed him, When Titus besieged Jerusalem there was a plague in
Rome followed by a great fire. In 79 AD Mount Vesuvius erupted, causing a
darkness that lasted for days, and burying the cities of Pompeii and
Herculaneum under many feet of muddy ash.
The complicated struggle for succession went on for several
years until Constantine, the son of Constantius, was enthroned. He was hailed
as emperor by his father’s troops. After another dozen years of civil wars, he
became Constantine the Great, sole ruler of the Roman Empire.
And here we come to one of the major unsolved puzzles of history. Constantine was as unpleasant a character as
we have encountered so far in the story of Rome, not merely ruthless but
gratuitously cruel. One example will suffice.
When he decided to get rid of his wife Fausta – daughter of Maximian and sister
of Maxentius, both of whom Constantine had killed – he had her locked in her
bathroom and the heating turned up until she literally steamed to death. Yet this is the man who claimed he had been
converted to Christianity in rather the same manner as St. Paul. He alleged that, on the eve of the battle of
the Milvian Bridge, he had seen a cross in the sky and the words ‘By this sign
shall ye conquer.’ Constantine went into
battle with a spear turned into a cross as his standard, and conquered. From then on, Christianity became the
religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity has naturally been grateful to
Constantine ever since, and his biographer Eusebius explains how Constantine
had prayed earnestly for a sign from God, which was given in the form of the
cross. The fact remains that Constantine
did not become a Christian until he was on his death bed. And a life of betrayals, perjuries and
murders – including his own son – indicate that he remained untouched by the spirit of Christinity.
So why did Constantine decide to make Christianity the
official religion of the empire? There
are several possible explanations. One
is that he did indeed see a cross in some natural cloud formation which he
superstitiously took to be a ‘sign’ – we have seen that the Romans were
obsessed by omens. Another possibility
is that he was influenced by his mother Helena, a British princess (or
according to Gibbon, an innkeeper’s daughter), who at some point became a
Christian and later made a famous pilgrimage to the Holy Land and located the
cross on which Jesus was crucified. This
is just possible, except that Constantine saw very little of his mother during
his early manhood. Another possible explanation
is that he was influenced by the death – by disease – of the ‘Caesar’ Galerius,
who had persuaded Diocletian to persecute the Christians and who died believing
that his illness was sent by God to punish him.
Finally – and most likely – seems the explanation that Constantine
thought it would be appropriately dramatic for the all-powerful conqueror to
raise up the minority religion (only about one-tenth of his subjects were
Christians) to a position of supreme importance.
Whatever the answer, it seems unlikely that Christianity
finally conquered because Constantine became convinced of its truth. The historian Eusebius was being either naïve
or dishonest when he wrote: ‘When I gaze in spirit upon this thrice-blessed
soul, united with God, free of all mortal dross, in robes gleaming like
lightning and in ever-radiant diadem, speech and reason stand mute.’ For it seems likely that the empress Helena
made her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in an attempt to atone for the crimes
committed by her son, while Constantine himself felt no such misgivings.
When, in 326 A.D., Constantine decided to move his capital
from Rome to Byzantium, on the Hellespont, he was, in effect, handing over Rome
to the Christians. The city whose name
had become identified with materialism and violence became the city of love and
salvation, as we shall see, raised the intriguing question of which actually
conquered the other.
ISRAR HASAN
Sept.22, 2013
Source: [i]Colin Wilson’s “A
Criminal History of Mankind”;
Published by Panther Books, Granada Publishing Ltd.,
London, 1985.
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