She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, ‘The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.’
Wallace Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning’
L. HAD SAID — If you’re going to Israel, you’ve got to see Nablus. You’ll see Roman remains, she said, a great colonnade; and you’ll see Mount Gerizim towering above the old town. In legendary times, before King David, before the land divided into the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah, this was Israel’s cultic centre. Shechem is its name in the Bible. Then the centre shifted to Mount Zion and Jerusalem, and the people who were left behind, clinging to the old faith, were called Samaritans.
L. and I over the years–
Yes, but who the L.? writes my editor in the margin of the typescript. I see her point. But, by the end of this story, you will know enough about L. Enough. Not very much, but enough. That, by the way, will be one of the points of this book: how much knowledge is enough?
But it is not a book about L. It’s a book, in part, about what we have done to ourselves, as a culture either by neglecting the Bible or by making it into an offensive weapon with which to attack people with whom we disagree. L. was the one who was meant to be writing a book about the Bible, but this never came to anything. So in the end, I have decided to write my own version, incorporating some of the things she taught me. I don’t know whether she would agree with the conclusions – but that isn’t very important.
Back to Israel – in, I suppose, May 1991, when, on L.’s recommendations, we were driving to Nablus on a hot day. R. and I had been together for a couple of years, but still did not know one another very well. We had not yet married. Our companions were K. B., a young colleague on the newspaper where I worked, and his wife B. We were in Israel combining a holiday with a visit to K. B.’s mother, who, though Irish and non-Jewish, had come with a fairly recent husband to live at Jaffa/Joppa, a smart southern suburb of Tel Aviv, better known to the outside world for its oranges. At the party given to celebrate our arrival, we had been shown into a room which seemed to contain all the famous Israelis you’d ever heard of – Daniel Barenboim, Amos Oz, and so on. And now, family visits done, we had checked into the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, and were doing some sightseeing.
The car-hire firm had given some confusing, though not, at the time, particularly alarming advice about number plates. If we were going to Jewish areas, it would be safer to have such-and-such a number plate. And if we were going to the occupied West Bank?
Don’t go to the West Bank, was the advice.
But I wanted to see Nablus. I had been to Israel quite often before. I was of the generation where non-Jewish European students went to work on kibbutzim in their gap year. I’d done this after leaving boarding school in 1969 – I’d picked oranges at the Kibbutz Beit HaEmek, near Acre, explored crusader ruins, hitch-hiked through the Negev, smoked on the beach with hippies at Eilat before it was the huge holiday resort it is today, and seen the Biblical sites. I’d stayed for two weeks in Jerusalem at the Anglican cathedral, St George’s; I’d visited the Dome of the Rock, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Holy Sepulchre, taken buses to Galilee, seen Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethsaida and Tiberias. But I had never been to Nablus.
The name is an Arabic rationalization of the Greek ‘Neapolis’. It was a Hellenistic city, with splendid remains; and it was also in the heart of Biblical Samaria. As we bowled along in the boiling heat, there were many jokes about Good Samaritans, telephoning the Samaritans if we were not enjoying our holiday, and so forth.
Nablus is near the old Biblical site of Shechem, which was a flourishing Canaanite city in the second millennium BC (as recorded in Judges, Chapter 9). According to the old tales, recorded in Genesis, Abraham, our Father in Faith, had a theophany, a vision of God, at Shechem, and built an altar. His grandson Jacob (Israel) did the same [Genesis 33:18–20]. At some point in the early history of Israel, the people who worshipped God at Shechem broke away from those who worshipped God at Jerusalem. If you are a Samaritan, you would probably rewrite that sentence, that the worshippers at Jerusalem were the ones who broke away, while the Samaritans stayed loyal to the Abrahamic faith in Shechem. Certainly by 330 BC, in the Hellenistic period, Shechem was a great city, with a temple. It was laid waste in 107 BC by the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus, so by the time Jesus went there, it would have been a place which had seen better days. The Samaritans, however, are distinctive among the peoples mentioned in the Bible in that they alone, apart from the Jews and the Christians, survive as a separate religious entity to this day. They still maintain the old faith.
L. (who was a Presbyterian) had an affection for the Old Believers whenever they cropped up in Russian literature. (These were the sectarians who refused some very minor innovations in the Russian Orthodox Church in the eighteenth century and thereafter lived slightly outside the ordinary run of society.) She also sympathized with Roman Catholics who yearned for their Tridentine Latin Mass. And she claimed that she had once made a pilgrimage to Sussex to meet the very last of a seventeenth-century sect called the Muggletonians, who got it in the neck from Cromwell, and had been quietly waiting for the Second Coming ever since. They were quite a sizeable sect in Cromwellian days, but by the time L. met them, there were only two left. The Samaritans were her sort of people. One of her favourite sayings was, ‘The majority is always wrong’. Sometimes, she’d vary this by quoting the Willie Raskin song, ‘Fifty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong’. To which she would add, ‘Oh, yeah?’ (L. was American.)
It would seem as if the origin of the schism between Samaritans and Jews was simple conservatism. The Samaritans resented innovations being imported into the faith from Jerusalem. They had/have stricter dietary laws, and stricter Sabbath observance than the Jews. They venerate Mount Gerizim as a place where the God of Israel appeared long before he lighted upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
The encounter between Jesus and a woman of Samaria at Jacob’s Well [John 4] has no parallels in the other three Gospels. It tells of Jesus sitting by the well when the woman came to draw water. Jesus asked her for water to drink, and she was surprised that a Jew should ask this of a Samaritan, since Jews and Samaritans were on such bad terms.
Jesus then told her that, if she knew who he really was, who had asked her for a drink, then she would be asking him for water – living water. ‘The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”’ [John 4:11–14]
Anyone acquainted with the narrative of the Fourth Gospel will see here something very typical. It has been announced to us in the Preface that Jesus is the Eternal Logos or Word, who took human flesh and walked this earth unrecognized except by a few initiates. In some of the encounters, he gives a ‘sign’ (which is the word this Gospel uses more than ‘miracle’) of his true identity and God is thereby glorified. In others, the dramatic irony is preserved, as in this conversation with the Samaritan woman. She does not know who he is. She does not realize, when he speaks of the abundant, living water which he is offering her, that he is speaking symbolically. This is one who has already, in the course of this narrative, transformed water into wine, as a sign of the superabundance of God’s grace.
The prophet Jeremiah had spoken of God himself as the fountain of living water [Jeremiah 2:13] and it is this, access to the living God, which Jesus offers. Indeed, later in the conversation, Jesus reveals to us (the initiated readers) just who he is. The woman says that when the Messiah comes, he will reveal himself. ‘Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”’ [John 4:26] The ancient Greek word eimi just means ‘I am’. But in Hebrew, the great I AM is the word for God himself. The frequent use of the word by the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel proclaims him as the authentic mouthpiece of the living God.
Those with an interest in the geography of the New Testament note that the Fourth Gospel is alone in making Jesus journey through Samaria and have this discussion with a Samaritan. There are probably good reasons for this. One reason could well be that the author is using as his source the earlier Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles. The Book of Acts, perhaps written some time in the mid-AD 80s, speaks of the first Christians, Jews of Jerusalem, being persecuted by their fellow Jews and scattering to the countryside ‘of Judea and Samaria’ [Acts 8:1]. Acts speaks frequently either of the Church or of the Word moving first through Biblical Palestine, and then further out, through present-day Syria and up into Asia Minor (modern Turkey). In Acts, there survives the tradition of some in Samaria being converted to the Way of Christ. Probably what is happening in the narrative of Jesus and the woman at the well, in the Fourth Gospel, is that some backdating has gone on: Jesus, who is not recorded as having been to Shechem in Matthew, Mark or Luke, is here made to follow the progress of his church. By AD 90 or 100 – whenever this Gospel was written – the Word has reached Samaria; the Samaritans, some of them, have drunk of the Living Water.
In this narrative, Jesus and the woman then moved to some of the most basic questions which can be asked of any religion:
The woman said to him, ‘Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’ [John 4:19–24]
The Fourth Gospel is here in tune with the earliest Christian writings, those of St Paul. First came Judaism – but Judaism, though it had validity in the past, was too wedded to literalism. The revelation of what lay behind the old Bible stories has only been made plain in Christ. Of the Samaritan position, we learn little in the Synoptic Gospels, giving some readers to speculate that the Fourth Gospel has a Samaritan origin, perhaps from Shechem/ Nablus itself. Others place all the writings associated with the name John, the so-called Johannine writings, further west in Asia Minor, perhaps Ephesus.
The drive was fun, the May day light, hot but airy. The centre of Nablus, as we drove round and round trying to find the Church of the Holy Well, was pitted with potholes, and we began to wonder whether we knew the Arabic for ‘broken axle’, ‘flat tyre’, ‘wrecked car’, ‘do you take credit cards’, or ‘please get me out of here’. When we had parked, we sat for a while smoking outside a café, nibbling delicious intensely sweet kanafeh, a bright orange pastry crammed with honey-sweetened cheese, and drinking Turkish coffee. The waiter put us in the right direction for the church, which was an easy walk away.
If you are not Orthodox, the experience of entering a church of the Eastern rite is always exotic, but confusing. Should one bow, light tapers, cross oneself from right to left, rather than left to right as Westerners do? Or should one admit difference? Is that murmuring and chanting simply a priest praying, or is there some kind of service in progress?
Nothing was ‘going on’ in the church today, and a young priest, immediately recognizing us as European visitors, approached and told us the story of Jesus at the well.
While we showed reverence, the young priest went on to tell us the story of the Orthodox priest who had been martyred in the church as recently as 1979. Father Philumen had been standing beside the altar, near Jacob’s Well, when fanatical Israeli settlers burst into the church. They had visited a week before, demanding that all Christian symbols – crosses and icons – which had been given by God to Jacob be removed from ‘their’ Holy Well. On this visit, they were not content to abuse the priest verbally. His mutilated body was later found by the congregation. The fingers of his right hand, with which he would have crossed himself, had been chopped off, and as well as being stabbed, he had been beaten. Although the police were summoned, no one was ever prosecuted for his murder.
The story was painful on many levels. Clearly, the persecution of the Christians in Israel since 1945 was a reality. One of ‘our’ (C of E) churches in Jerusalem had been burned to the ground and the Israeli fire brigade had been mysteriously slow to come with the hosepipes. On the other hand, these stories – with which you get regaled at all the Christian shrines in Israel/Palestine – of Israeli encroachment on church property, for example – are tinged with a curdled anti-Jewish hatred. We had just been entertained, only days before, by the crème de la crème of liberal Israel, and it was odious to be reminded of the evil things which human beings did to one another because of disputes about the Bible. The debate between the woman at the well and Jesus had here been translated into a modern splurge of ignorant hatred between two groups who disputed the other’s reading of God’s Book. There was the added pain of not knowing how much of the young priest’s story was true. Father Philumen had been murdered – it was an acknowledged fact. But he is now a canonized saint, and any attempt to get to the forensic truth of the case would seem, to one side, to be blasphemous intrusion, and to the other, creepily anti-Jewish.
Quietened by the sad experience of visiting Jacob’s Well, we returned to the car, thinking we should be able to see the fine Roman colonnade which L. had recommended, and then maybe have a bite of lunch. But a small crowd had gathered round the car – of boys and youths. The car-hire man had either not properly explained the drill over number plates, or we had not been listening. More likely, we should have heeded his advice not to go into the West Bank with an Israeli car and an Israeli number plate.
The two women of the party were sensible enough to get into the car immediately, and to urge the two men to do the same. Both educated at English boarding schools, the men – K. B. and I – thought we could smile and charm and be patronizing to the protesters who were, after all, only boys. But as the stones started to hurtle in our direction, we followed the wise example of the women and got into the car. My journalist colleague was at the wheel, and after reversing into what felt, not like a pothole, but a volcanic crater, lurched forward again with splutters of the engine, clouds of white dust and a mechanical clanking from behind which made it perfectly possible (if we were judging by hearing alone) that the back of the car containing B. and R. had actually been left on the road. We all drove off, however, with the stones and bricks pelting the sides of the car. Luckily, none hit the windscreen, and we were soon out of town on the dusty road. The Biblical landscape, with Arab shepherds driving their flocks over scrubland, and fudge-coloured hills rolling on either side, took us back again, through what seemed like David Roberts prints or aquatint illustrations of our childhood Gospel-books, to the troubled city of Jerusalem, to a long soak in the bath followed by an even longer soak in the bar. The appalling hatred inspired by the Bible, and by human beings’ conflicting readings of the Holy Book, had been on raw display.
As always when visiting Israel/Palestine, the mind returned to the ancient, churning questions of how This turned into That.
For most non-Christians, the puzzle is a very simple one. They can understand that there was once a very holy, wise prophet in Palestine, who attracted a number of followers and who taught them – out of his own Jewish tradition – a new way of living: to live without a sense of self, to abandon concepts of hierarchy, to discard wealth, to eschew violence. They can understand why, when this prophet died, some of his followers collected together his sayings and how, eventually, there were books written which described his dedicated life of teaching and healing. Apparently, he died at the time of the Jewish Passover, during the procuratorship of a notoriously cruel and repressive Roman governor – Pontius Pilate. Like thousands of criminals in the Roman world, he died the hideous death of crucifixion. His followers took the sign of the cross as an emblem in his memory. It became, not merely something by which they remembered Jesus, but an emblem of what he had stood for: the death of self, leading to a resurrection, a new life.
All this can be understood by anyone, whatever their religious background or set of beliefs. What non-Christians (and today, very many Christians) find truly impossible to understand is how this crucified prophet could be claimed as a divine being. One way of explaining this development is to point out that Jesus lived in the eastern Mediterranean, during an era of polytheism. There were many gods. One of the early Christian writers, Luke, describes an incident in a city of Lycaonia, Lystra. Two of the early Christians, Paul and Barnabas, healed a lame man who had previously lost the use of his feet. The excitable crowds ‘shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates; and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice.’ [Acts 14:11–13]
Surely something of the kind must have happened in the case of Jesus – only not in his lifetime, but after his death? The Jews had only One God, and for them it would have been unthinkable that a prophet from among their own number could be a god. But once the news of Jesus spread among non-Jews, and once Paul took the message to places such as Lystra – where you could be proclaimed a god merely for curing someone’s lame feet – the atmosphere was different. In the hothouse of first-century pagan Asia Minor, was it not natural that the Christian cult – decades after the real Jesus had left the scene – should have made him into a god?
Certainly, there have been many people – both scholars and well-meaning amateurs – who have read the history of Christianity in this way. Part of their difficulty rests in the fact that there is next to no historical evidence for what the actual Jesus was like. There is a tradition about Jesus, which we first read in the Letters of Paul (AD 50s and early 60s) and which was written down in the form of Gospels in the period AD 70–100. But very little of this material would be of use to a secular historian. No one in the ancient world would have understood exactly what we mean by dispassionate history. It is very important to understand this if one is to make any sense of the strange history of Christianity. There have been many people who have tried to reconstruct the historical Jesus, from the four Gospels in the New Testament, and from the very scanty evidence which exists about Judaism in the first century. But the trouble here is how do you decide which bits of evidence are ‘authentic’ and which are elaborations, or distortions, or downright inventions? At the time of the Enlightenment in Europe and America, the answer to this seemed rather simple. Thomas Jefferson, for example, in The Philosophy of Jesus and The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, wrote a rationalists’ ‘Gospel’, which involved the easy exercise of removing from the story all the miracles. Seventy years later, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, having written the great fictional masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina, did something similar to Jefferson in Russia, reducing Christianity, and the Gospels, to a compendium of pacifist teachings and removing all references to miraculous healings, as well as to appearances by angels, the rising of Jesus from the dead, or the pouring out of the Spirit upon his followers. Many Americans and Europeans found Jefferson’s version of Christianity much more reasonable than the old version, and used the Bible, thereafter, as a compendium of old writings, some of which could help us to live a good life, but much of which clearly belonged to an antiquated, lost way of looking at the world. Likewise in Russia, and throughout the world, millions of men and women were inflamed with Tolstoy’s distillation of Jesus’s teachings about peace and about the discarding of possessions. Mahatma Gandhi, then a young lawyer in South Africa, was one of those who put these teachings into practice: the radical programme of passive resistance to the British Empire, which led to the eventual ending of the Raj in India, was a direct consequence of Tolstoy’s work.
Is it not altogether more rational, if we are attracted to the teachings of Jesus, to follow some such line of approach – to discard any attempt to get our minds around the extraordinary claims made by the earliest Christian writers? For example, in the version of the Fourth Gospel which is read aloud each Christmas, it is stated that ‘He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him’ [John 1:3].
How could such a saying possibly be true? How could it mean anything? How could it be possible to subscribe to a creed which stated that a prophet, who had died by crucifixion some time in the 30s of our era, should have been, not merely ‘a god’ – as the people in Lystra thought Paul was ‘a god’ – but, a staggering claim, God himself?
One answer to this could, naturally, be that Jesus himself went about making this claim, and that this was why he was killed – for blaspheming the beliefs of his fellow Jews, who only believe in One God. Versions of this idea resurface throughout Christian history, but a sober reading of the New Testament does not really allow us to believe this. For a start, crucifixion is a Roman method of execution, and no one would have been crucified simply for expressing a view of himself which contradicted Jewish teachings. Secondly, the Gospel writings do not quite allow us to say that Jesus did claim to be God. Rather, they are written by those who revere Jesus as Lord. They are well on the way to believing the full creed of the later Church, that Jesus was ‘God from God, light from Light, True God from True God’. In the earliest Gospel, Mark, for example, we read of a healing story, in which Jesus pronounces the forgiveness of a paralytic man’s sins. The scribes object – does he not know that no one can forgive sins but God? Jesus replied by asking, ‘“Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk?’ But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” – he said to the paralytic – “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.”’ [Mark 2:9–12]
In other words, Jesus was performing the acts of God, both when he healed the body and when he pronounced forgiveness to the soul. In the Fourth Gospel, the idea of Who Christ Was (what is known as Christology) has developed further. In the passage we have just quoted about Jesus at the well, the woman says that she awaits the Messiah, to which he replies, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you’ [John 4:26]. The ancient Greek eimi for ‘I am’ is also the word for the unutterable name of God, pronounced long ago to Moses from the Burning Bush.
Talking – and writing – to L. about these things after our visit to Nablus, I confided in her my desire to see if I could not somehow make an attempt to recover or reconstruct the historical Jesus.
There was a long sigh.
—You know that’s not possible! she said. —The Gospels are all books which were written, by their own account, on the testimony of eye-witnesses to the life of Jesus. But they are not written by the eye-witnesses. They are written, therefore, by the next generation down – by, as it were, the grandchildren of Jesus’s contemporaries. The testimony which they carry, and which they wish to be passed on through the generations, is nothing less than the Christian faith. That is their task in writing the Gospels. They are written from the point of view of those who already held certain very clear beliefs about Jesus. But they are not modern biographies, still less works of modern investigative history. Nobody was extant, in the years AD 30–90 or 100, to say ‘Jesus said such and such, but I have been to Rome and interviewed the followers of Peter; I have been to Antioch and met the grandchildren of the first Christians and I can tell you otherwise. . .’ That is the way a modern historian or journalist would go to work, but no such evidence was ever collected or written down. Therefore, however much we try to sift through the New Testament writings for such ‘evidence’ of what really did or did not happen, we are not going to find very much to help us.
What all the writings provide, in abundance, L. continued, is the faith of the early Church, the faith of the Christians. This written evidence first comes to us from Thessalonica, from Galatia (roughly the location of the present-day capital of Turkey, Ankara) and from Rome. Some of it probably comes from Palestine, where Jesus actually lived, but of that we can be much less certain. None of these documents provide more than fragmentary hints of what the actual historical Jesus did or said except in so far as these sayings and doings relate to later Christian faith. They are gifts to the future generations – but they are the gifts of an inherited tradition of faith. They are not ‘research materials’: they are the living words of an already existing tradition, which worships Christ as redeemer.
Of course I knew that L. was right. But I was in a curious mood just then. Rather than listening to L.’s objections, I had set out on my own quest for the real Jesus, first by writing a book, and then by translating what I’d written into the form of a television programme.
Making a documentary film about the historical Jesus was a challenge. The idea had arisen because I had been asked by a publisher to write a book on the subject. Against my better judgement, I had said yes. Why against my better judgement? Because I had once read theology at Oxford, and I knew that such a task was impossible. The Quest for the Historical Jesus had always proved illusory to scholars in the past, ever since, in the early nineteenth century in Germany, they had begun to believe it was possible, by painstaking research, to find out the unvarnished historical truth about a non-mythologized Jesus.
When the book was finished, and we thought up a title for the television programme – ‘Jesus Before Christ’ – the full nature of the misconception should have become clear.
Why is it a misconception?
Many of us, programmed by reading history and journalism, and by following stories on TV or radio news bulletins, suppose that it should be possible, even from the fragmentary materials which exist, to reconstruct what actually happened, who Jesus actually was, how he related to the Judaism of Galilee in his own day, whether he made any ‘claims’ for himself, or whether these were invented afterwards by myth-makers. But that is the sort of evidence which the New Testament simply does not offer to us. You get no more evidence about the historical Jesus from reading the New Testament than you would if you opened the door of a church in, let us say, present-day Thessalonika, and heard the curious chantings of the Orthodox liturgy. If you were not Orthodox, the words, the music, the enigmatic movements of the priests, the incense rising before the icons would all be incomprehensible. But here is the living Christian tradition. In these chants, in these repetitions of words from Scripture, in these stylized sacred pictures which adorn the walls and the screens, in these lighted candles, is a retention of the mysterious thing which the New Testament also contains: namely the Christian faith. If you entered the church with an Orthodox friend, they would no doubt be able, little by little, to explain to you what was going on, why men in strange robes were appearing and disappearing behind the doors, why they were bowing to the pictures, or waving incense.
It is a little like this when we read the New Testament. Because we read it in modern English, we might suppose that we understand it, and that it is a collection of ‘historical’ writings, almost accidentally encrusted with ‘legends’ or bits of esoteric philosophy or mythology culled from the paganism of the first-century world. We might suppose that we could understand it by processes of dissection. In fact, the understanding can never grow unless, as in the middle of a baffling foreign liturgy, we allow it to speak to us, rather than imposing our prejudices and presuppositions upon it.
The collection of documents which comprise the New Testament are all very mysterious. I am not referring here to the fact that academic writers puzzle over them. Their task is a special one, calling for a knowledge of ancient languages and cultural history which only a very few would be able to acquire in a lifetime. By saying that the New Testament is mysterious, I am saying something much simpler. To any of us who might open its pages, just as to any of us who pushes open the door of a Christian church to this day, there are mysteries to be experienced. There are stories and images of Christ – just as there are in a church building. But there is precious little ‘evidence’. There is a haunting music, which, if our inward ear is attentive, harmonizes with something we already knew. There is a personal appeal, without which the whole enterprise would be mere archaeology, mere antiquarianism. By personal appeal, I mean personal. Those who read the New Testament, or who confront the Christian tradition through the liturgies of the Church, or through observing Christian lives, will soon start to realize that they are not merely encountering a set of rules or a set of stories. The pages of the book, like the buildings of a church, are inhabited. An encounter is about to take place. . .
If you do not believe the Christian tradition – that Jesus was Christ, that Jesus left behind his everlasting presence in the Church, in the Blessed Sacrament of Bread and Wine, that Jesus was the Word Made Flesh – then it seems reasonable, as stated above, to believe that the Church invented this ‘theological’ Christ out of its memories of a real Galilean prophet who left behind some marvellous teachings, parables about brotherly love and examples of unselfishness. This way of thinking about Jesus was popular in the practical, sceptical nineteenth century. Inspired by such Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, a whole series of different nineteenth-century writers came up with a Jesus in whom a rationalist could believe. David Friedrich Strauss, of the University of Tübingen, made a critical study of the Gospels, and eventually wrote The Life of Jesus, which was translated into English by Marian Evans – known to us as George Eliot. Like so many intellectuals of her age, George Eliot was convinced by Strauss’s ability to ‘get behind’ the original documents of the New Testament and somehow produce the authentic prophet; rather as Victorian architects pulled down medieval buildings, with their encrustations of later architectural additions, and put up brand-new, but more authentically ‘medieval’ Gothic Revival buildings. Strauss, a tormented Hegelian, had enormous influence in the Protestant world, and was a friend, among others, of Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Alice, whose low spirits and experiences of bereavement led her to lose faith in traditional Christianity. Ernest Renan, a French ex-priest, was a more charming writer than Strauss and his Vie de Jésus likewise became an international best-seller. It depicted an idealistic rural prophet, persecuted by the ecclesiastical bigots of his day – bigots who, though named Scribes and Pharisees, bore an unsurprising resemblance to the right-wing royalist Ultramontanes who exercised such influence in the French Catholic Church of Renan’s day. After a century of writers reconstructing the Historical Jesus, there came Albert Schweitzer with his classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which made it clear that in looking at what they believed to be Jesus, these well-meaning people were looking down a well and gazing at a reflection of their own faces – or perhaps it would be fairer to Schweitzer to say that they were looking at an image of what they thought best in human nature. Schweitzer himself then provided us with yet another Jesus – perhaps an image of himself? It was of a prophet in despair who believed the world was about to come to an end and who died forsaken by his God.
The trouble with all these Jesuses, as Schweitzer pointed out, is that they were imaginary. In the 1970s, there was another attempt by the scholarly world to reconstruct the historical Jesus, with such attractive books as Geza Vermes’s Jesus the Jew, and a whole industrial plant, in the American academic scene, of seekers of the historical Galilean. With the advent of computers as a research aid, it was believed that you could feed in all the known sayings of Jesus and determine which ones were ‘authentic’. It was a doomed enterprise. No methodology exists by which you could ever determine whether a story about Jesus is or is not authentic. You believe it is possible that he compared the Kingdom of God to the sower going out to throw seed on the ground, some of which is eaten by birds, some of it choked by thorns, and some growing abundantly (in Mark 4:1–9). This is the sort of story you would imagine a rural Galilean prophet telling, and the Biblical commentaries will tell you that, even if this method of sowing seems wasteful by European standards, it really was practised in the Levant.
But though you might believe this story emanates from Jesus, there is nothing to prove that this is authentic, and the story of, say, his walking on the water in Matthew 14:22–27 is inauthentic, other than your preconceived idea that people just don’t walk on water!
The filming was an exhausting experience. We went at the hottest time of the year, and at various junctures everyone in the team became ill. An especially memorable experience was swooping over the whole land of Israel in a helicopter. We were seeing the Land of Promise in a single half-hour, as an eagle or an angel might have seen it – through the Negev, over Jerusalem, up towards Galilee. But as we did so, the charming, hippyish Israeli cameraman, who had been a little tottery from the heat even before the flight began, started to vomit copiously. On another day, after we had been filming for hours in the baking heat at Sepphoris, the Hellenistic city which archaeologists have unearthed just over the valley from Nazareth, first I, and then the English cameraman wilted, and several days of dysentery followed, cured by a gentle old Arab who made us drink sage tea. Simply add boiling water to sage leaves and drink: I recommend it to anyone with the wrenching gut-pains, the endless runs, the near delirium which the condition entails. We were cured almost instantly.
A dazzling array of distinguished scholars had been flown out to take part in the film, including Geza Vermes himself, Ed Sanders, then Professor of New Testament at Duke University, and Paula Fredriksen of Boston University. They all, like me, wanted to plug the idea of the simple Galilean prophet who had been turned into a figure of mythology – by Paul, by the Early Church, by some mysterious process of history.
When you are filming with people, you spend a lot of time together, and more is revealed of oneself than would be the case during, say, a simple academic conference. It struck me that, although we all considered ourselves to be rationalists, we were peddling a story which basically made no sense whatsoever.
Filming had been miserable. Not only had we all been ill, we had been tetchy. There had been squabbles between director and presenter which the wise – actually rather saintly – English cameraman and sound recordist had helped to calm. R. had kindly flown out to console me in my misery, and we decided to return to the American Colony hotel for a few days’ holiday before we flew back to England.
Any visitor to Jerusalem must have conflicts of feeling. In my own case, I had visited the city so often that I believed the conflicts to be under control. I thought I was ‘mature’ enough to live with the multi-faceted palimpsest of the city’s history and to recognize that it was inevitable, given the nature of the place and the intensity of beliefs which had been held around it, that hatreds, like briars, should so readily have sprung up.
On this visit, however, we were both overwhelmed by the hatred all around us. Going to the Holy Sepulchre had been a mixed experience: you could sense the seriousness and piety of the pilgrims, and smile indulgently at the Franciscan friars deliberately provoking the Orthodox monks as they stomped around the crusader church, banging their staves on the stone floor. It is said – I think it is true – that the key of the whole church has to be in the custody of a Muslim because the Christians have fought – literally fought – over who had the right to possess it. While we were in Jerusalem that last visit, there was yet another story in the newspaper – was it about an Armenian monk hitting a Copt over the head with a broom, or was it aboiut an Orthodox doing something equally violent to a Copt? The bristling hatred is alive, like some virus, in every spice-fumed alley and every scrubby escarpment of the city. Nor, of course, is the hatred limited to late-classical or medieval Christian feuds, grotesquely perpetrated at the holy sites. At the Al-Aqsa mosque are preserved the blood-stained clothing of the children gunned down by Israeli troops during one of the intifadas. The American Colony is just around the corner from the Palestinian Authority. Towards the end of Saturday, we sat in the garden drinking mint tea when we heard what seemed to be a small riot happening outside the walls of the hotel. We went out to investigate. The hotel janitor told us it happened every week, as the Shabbat ended. A large group of young men – looking as if they had come from a shtetl in Minsk, circa 1870, in wide-brimmed furry hats, black frock coats and some still wearing or holding their fringed prayer shawls – marched through the street, yelling abuse and waving banners.
Back at the hotel, we changed our mint tea to strong whisky. The atmosphere of loathing which the Israeli demonstrators had displayed seemed all of a piece with every other manifestation of human idiocy we had seen and heard: monks hitting other monks with brooms, Muslims hating Jews, fanatical Muslim suicide bombers blowing themselves up at crowded bus stops, etc., etc., etc.
I thought back to the boys who had thrown stones at the car the previous year, in Nablus. Places carry memories in earth, stones and trees. Certain places – for me, the shrine of Apollo at Delphi is such a place, and the shrine at Walsingham – seem afloat with peacefulness. Other places – such as the battlefield of Campaldino which I once visited when researching my book on Dante – still shimmer with menace, as do some of the forts in the Scottish borders where reivers and bandits have fought and killed one another so persistently over the years. Nablus/Shechem has been seething with religious hatred for years. This fact was known, presumably, not only by the author of the Fourth Gospel but by his first audience, a fact which made the encounter between a Jewish healer-prophet and a Samaritan woman at the well so striking. ‘“Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”’ [John 4:20–21]
After that last visit to Jerusalem – and I feel no inclination to return – I was shell-shocked by the sheer stupid hatred displayed by all sorts of human beings, caused by one thing: religion. I resolved to sit down and try to write a rational book about the Bible. It would surely be possible to put into words a cool, sensible account of how the Bible actually came to be written. This would be the sanest counterblast to the hatred we had so palpably witnessed in the Holy City.
No doubt the religiously based conflicts in the world originated for any number of psychological, historical and sociological reasons. But as far as the People of the Book were concerned, it was all based on fundamental misconceptions about the Bible. The most passionately hate-filled disputes, continuing through generations and centuries, were being fought between people who entertained different views on the Bible. And these views were not based on reasonable difference. The bitterest wars, the bloodiest battles, were fought between people of near-total ignorance.
—You should write a sensible book about the Bible, I told L.
We had met in London at the Museum Tavern. It was before the British Library moved up to the Euston Road, and she had spent the day in the old reading room where Marx wrote Das Kapital. I had bought her half a pint of ginger-beer shandy, but she had not done more than sip from it as she puffed on cigarettes. I was drinking red wine.
—How to Read the Bible. She laughed. —It sounds too bossy. How to Read the Bible Sensibly. A Sensible Person’s Guide to the Bible.
—After that last experience of Israel, I replied, I almost wonder whether the Bible should not be banned. Whenever I turn on a television or open a newspaper, there is yet another instance of religion inspiring people to behave, not just badly but insanely. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain. The Bible says we are entitled to this bit of land. The Bible says women must do that or gays must do the other. Obscure bits of the Bible, perhaps scratched on a piece of papyrus in the second century BC, relating to some Bronze Age myth, were seriously produced, in the United States and Great Britain, as reasons for objecting to medical research, or liberalization of certain laws. Questions about how we could teach our children science are also obscured by arcane twisting of the Bible, to make it a geological or biological textbook, set up in competition against the discoveries of post-1850 scientists.
—Maybe you’re too angry to write a book about the Bible. Maybe you should go away and learn a language.
I saw that L. was hurt, but I did not quite understand why.
She was right, I think. No doubt there was a need for a quietly rational book, explaining to these misguided multitudes why they had got the Bible all wrong. But if I was right, and they were all such bigots, who among the fundamentalists would want to read such a book?
It was the period when anti-God literature had started to hit the best-seller lists. There was no God and these angry writers were his prophets. Nearly all my sympathies were with the denouncers. Salman Rushdie had been condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran – for writing a novel! I wrote a short, intemperate pamphlet entitled ‘Against Religion’. I suppose, in common with most liberal thought in the 1990s, that was my simple position. But nothing is ever simple, and the idea of writing that Bible book did not entirely go away.