There was a kind of worldwide religious explosion in the
fifth century B.C. None had achieved the
same impact or spread with the same speed as Christianity. This is basically because Christianity was a
reaction against Roman materialism.
The agitator known as Jeshua, or Jesus of Nazareth was born
in about the twentieth year of the reign of Augustus – around 10 B.C., Pompey
the Great had placed the Jews under Roman rule in 63 B.C. 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 of 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 th Jews from foreign rule, increased
year by year.
The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that,
outside of the New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would so
permanently alter the course of human history. The earliest and most reliable
non-biblical reference to Jesus comes from the first-century Jewish historian
Flavis Josephus (d. 100 C.E.). In a brief passage in the Antiquities, Josephus writes of a fiendish Jewish high priest named
Ananus who, unlawfully condemned a certain “James, the brother of Jesus, the
one they call messiah” to stoning for transgression of the law. The passage
moves on to relate what happened to Ananus after the new governor, Albinus,
finally arrived in Jerusalem. The
passage proves not only that “Jesus, the one they call messiah” probably
existed, but that by the year 94 C.E. when the Antiquities was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of
a new and enduring movement.
Gospels present their own set of problems. To begin with, excepting the gospel of Luke,
none of the gospels we have were written by the person after whom they
named. This is actually true of most of
the books in the New Testament. Such works attributed to but not written by a
specific author, were extremely common in the ancient world and should by no
means be thought of as forgeries. The
gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of
Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds
recorded by people who knew him. They
are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many
years after the events they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about
Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man.[1]
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’ probably signed by Pontius
Pilate, and later quoted by the Jewish historian Josephus, whose reconstructed
text runs as follows:
“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.” [2]
The original portrait of Jesus – with a humped back, long
nose, half-bald head and scanty beard – was altered by later Christians to
read: “ruddy skin, 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….”.[3]
In 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’.
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. John the Baptist
was almost certainly an Essene. And the
Dead Sea scrolls make it clear that Jesus was heavily influenced by them.
It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within
any of the known religio-political movements of his time. He was a man of profound contradictions, one
day preaching a message of racial exclusion (“I was sent solely to the lost
sheep of Israel”; Matthew 15:24), the next of benevolent universalism (“Go and
make disciples of all nations”; Matthew 28:19); sometimes calling for
unconditional peace (“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the
son of God”; Matthew 5:9), sometime promoting violence and conflct (“If you do
not hae a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one”; Luke 22:36).[4]
This carpenter’s son from Nazareth, who began to preach in
the twenty-eight year of his life rode into Jerusalem after four years of
preaching 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. When asked if he was the Messiah,
Jesus replied in the affirmative.
Caiaphas was outraged. 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.’
He tried to get Jesus released – mercy was shown to a condemned man every
Passover – but the people, who were as clamorous as Roman mob, did not show any
mercy. And so Jesus of Nazareth died on
the cross.
One thing about Jesus that seems very clear is that he
possessed remarkable healing powers.
Josephus, as we have seen, describes him as a magician. What seems quite
clear to us that Jesus had developed a high degree of healing power and this
seems to explain why he was regarded as a magician.
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. They believed that Jesus was
a political Messiah who would lead the Jews to freedom. 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, who later came to be called Christians, was followers
of Paul as much as of Jesus. Within a
few years of the crucifixion, this 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.
Vespasian, who was next in line for emperor of Rome, was
appointed by the senate in 70 A.D. He
sent his son Titus to subdue the Jewish rebels. Titus did it with Roman
brutality and ruthlessness. After a
six-month siege, the temple was burned, the Zealots massacred (more than a
million of them), and the treasures of the Temple were carried back to Rome. The Messianists were among those who were
slaughtered. Paul’s Christians, who were
scattered all over the place, were the only followers of Jesus left.
Whether Jesus was Jewish by nationality or not (as 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. That was the kind of blasphemy that was
typical of the Romans. There is no evidence that Jesus ever took such a
rationalistic view of his mission. His statement that he could forgive sins
suggests that he believed he was in some kind of direct communication with God.
Paul seems to have been fascinated by the parallel between
Jesus and various other Middle Eastern gods, who died and were resurrected –
Attis and Adonis, the Egyptian Osiris, the Babylonian Tammuz – such stories
were common at the time. Paul was also a Jew, and the Jews in the time of Jesus
were much preoccupied with the question of salvation of their sins. Now in one stroke, Paul had added an amazing
new dimension to Judaism: not only a traditional saviour-god, but one who had
come to solve that ancient problem of misery and sin. Jesus had vicariously atoned for the sins of
mankind; after Armageddon, his followers would live forever.
This new version of Christianity appealed to gentiles as
much as Jews. Anyone of any sensitivity
only had to look at the Rome of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero to understand just
what Paul meant. These sex-mad drunkards
were a living proof that something had gone wrong. And the Roman matrons who
took up prostitution for pleasure
revealed that Eve had fallen just as far as Adam. The world was
nauseated by Roman brutality, Roman materialism, Roman 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 crucifixions,
floggings and arbitrary executions. The
Christians hoped it was a promise of the end of the world.
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 event 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 standards, 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 Christianity.
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 (an innkeeper’s daughter, according to
Gibbon), 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. 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. 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; Caesar
surrendered his crown to the pope. Subsequent
history, as we shall see, raised the intriguing question: who actually
conquered in the fight of the Roman Empire and the Church?
ISRAR
HASAN
FEB.
10, 2014
Source: “A
Criminal History of Mankind”, by Colin Wilson, Panther Books, Granada Publishing Ltd.,
London, 1985.
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