But the whole Bible, not its prophetical portions only, is written
on the principle of development. As the Revelation proceeds, it is
ever new, yet ever old.
John Henry Newman, An Essay on the
Development of Christian Doctrine
WE HAVE PASSED through six parts of our seven-part journey. In the first part, on an abortive visit to Mount Gerizim and the ancient shrine of Shechem, we learnt of the aridity of the dead-end Quest for the Historical Jesus detached from the Christ of traditional faith. Jesus was seen from the beginning through the prism of pre-existent Biblical metaphors – as the ‘living water’ written about by Jeremiah [2:13, 17:13], and as the sacrificial lamb of Pesach, the high point in the Jewish liturgical year. The people who wrote the Bible by and large had this typological way of reading the Bible and it would be fiendishly difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the historical ‘nuggets’ which their method of writing might have contained.
One thing which has been with us from the beginning is a con sciousness, not always apparent in academic books about the Bible, nor in books written with the specific apologetic purpose of converting the reader to particular forms of literalism, that the Bible has not had a life detached from people.
It did not appear, as some have been persuaded, that the Book of Mormon appeared all in one go, dictated by an Archangel. ‘Fundamentalists’ want to make the true, organic, living Bible into an ersatz Bible like the Book of Mormon. But the real Bible was the creation of many writers and – just as important – many translators, and – even more important – many readers who soaked it up, reading it daily until it became part of their lives, and until their lives became part of it.
It has not only dictated the way men and women have thought about their place in the scheme of things. It has itself been shaped by what they thought, experienced, felt. So, with perhaps the most basic religious question of all – is there a God? – the Bible begins with surprising answers. Most of what human beings have taken for gods, or religions, are utterly rejected, over and over again, by the Bible. The Torah proposes a totally new way of looking at God. Indeed, by the time the earliest Bible-writers were putting together the stories, laws and ordinances which make up the first books of the Bible, they had decided that there were no gods at all.
The Bible God is therefore different entirely in kind from previous conceptions of God, though it bears points of resemblance to (roughly) contemporary rejections of the gods by Plato and the Buddha.
‘You shall have no other gods before me’ [Exodus 20:3]. It is a text which is at the basis of the Judaeo-Christian inheritance. It seems on the face of it belligerent, intolerant, even foolish. By what right do the People of the Book claim that they have all the answers, and that those who do not share their beliefs should be cast into outer darkness? But this is not what these words, written by P in whenever it was (500–200 BC), really mean. Belligerent, intolerant people have seized on the words to mean that We are Right and They are Wrong. But the words really mean: banish all preconceptions about religion from your mind. Get rid of them. Banish idols from your mind. If you are making the God of the Bible into an idol, banish him too. If you are making the Bible an idol, banish that.
God is a Verb. That is the message of the Pentateuch. God is emergent, God is not a being within the established order, he is being. All depends on him, not the other way around. That lies at the heart of the first perception of the Bible in the Torah.
In the Prophets, we began to see the difference between the worship of an idol and the true worship of One who is a Verb. For the worship of Yahweh transforms life, undermines prejudices, upsets hierarchies. The Prophet is the archetypical figure who troubles Israel; that is, who troubles kings and authorities and upsets preconceptions. While the secularized intelligentsia in the West had decided that the Bible was a dead letter, we contemplated the lives of those for whom the Bible was a living Word – Dr King’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, Father Huddleston’s campaigns against apartheid in South Africa and Solzhenitsyn’s determination, if necessary single-handedly, to tell the truth about Stalin’s Soviet Union were all directly inspired by the spirit of Scriptural Prophecy. ‘Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you’ [Matthew 5:12 AV].
The third great section of the Bible which we considered was that known as the Writings. As we did so, we contemplated the meaning of the word ‘Wisdom’ in its Christian history. Building the Hagia Sophia was a way of ‘reading the Bible’. Architecture, painting, music and the exercise of the imagination – these were all the activities of those who found in the Bible an inspiration to follow the God who is a Verb.
In Chapters Five and Six, we considered two Wisdom books in greater depth. Job is one of the greatest works of literature in the world, a tragedy of Sophoclean or Shakespearean dimensions. It is the Bible in miniature. It is deeply subversive of any pietistic or contentedly ‘religious’ view of the world. It appears to be a story about God testing a man, but it is in truth a story about humanity putting God on trial, as the Rabbis put God on trial in Auschwitz. (When they’d found him guilty, they went to their prayers, an exact parallel to Job’s cry, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him’ [Job 13:15 AV].)
Out of Job – the perfect man both embodying the Divine Wisdom and putting the Divine Judge on trial – comes Christian theology and an understanding of the Cross.
The other great Wisdom book, which has been the prayer book of synagogues and churches for, probably, two and a half thousand years, is Psalms. These poems are the poems of the inner life of humanity; in them, humanity has brought its exultant joy at the presence and goodness of God, its self-disgust at human wrongdoing, its anguished fear of death, its desolated sense of God’s absence.
The book of Psalms has been at the centre of Christian piety since the beginning. Not only monks and nuns and priests, but all Christian people have used the repetition of the Psalms as a template off which to read their own backslidings, triumphs, griefs, doubts. . . Many of the Psalms, as with other texts of the Old Testament, have been used by the Gospel-writers to shape the story of Jesus, and especially the stories of his death.
But here we confronted a difficulty. We understand something of what the Christian life is, in all its spiritual richness, and all its potential for good. But if all the texts of the Gospels are really a tapestry of quotations from the Old Testament, if Jesus is constantly made by the authors of the Gospels to correspond to tropes and types from the old Bible, how do we know that he is any more than those tropes and types? Is there not a case for believing that he never in fact existed?
And here we move to our seventh and final stage of the journey.
L.’s letters and conversations about the Bible, over a period of three decades, persuaded me of the attractiveness, and the interest, of the Biblical texts. But the conversation was interrupted by her death. Several years passed during which I wrote books which had nothing to do with the Bible – some novels, some works of modern history. I had started to read the Bible again, however, and to read it in (to me) new ways. I found myself wondering whether I was qualified to write the most difficult part of the story – namely the chapter about the New Testament. It would be a chapter which had to decide the plausibility of the New Testament as an historical witness.
The New Testament is made up of twenty-seven pieces of writing, dating from around AD 50 to, perhaps, 100. During this half-century, the very word ‘Witness’ to the burgeoning Christian Church took on differing depths of meaning. Christians ‘witnessed’ to their faith in the most costly way of all, a fact attested by our use of the Greek word for witness: martyr. In what amounts to a Fifth Gospel, the Roman Canon, which I had heard in the nuns’ chapel, the story does not simply revolve around a recollection of Jesus and his twelve; it recites the names of martyrs, those who were prepared to die, often in the most extreme agony, rather than deny the Gospel.
How does one go about trying to build a satisfactory picture of the New Testament and its world? To put it another way, what can a modern historian, or interested inquirer, get out of these twenty-seven texts? Those who believe that it is possible to make a Quest for the Historical Jesus, of the kind I so vainly attempted in my book and TV film in Chapter One, would of course look for the earliest known references to Jesus, and start from there. They would try to ‘deconstruct’ the Gospels for nuggets of what might – perhaps – be plausible pieces of historical ‘evidence’.
But the Gospels do not yield up much in the way of historical evidence. If we are wishing to ask historical questions about the New Testament, it might be better to concentrate on something which we know to be an historical event: namely, that great historical event which had so explosive, catastrophic an effect upon Judaism and upon Christianity: namely the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. If we chose one New Testament text which dated before the destruction of the city and the Temple, and one text which dated from after that event, what results would that yield?
I’m going to start my exploration with an obviously non-historical text – the Letter to the Hebrews. We do not look here for dateable events, but for concepts, ideas, images to nourish and inform the mind. In so far as they provide us with ‘evidence’ or ‘witnesses’, it is not evidence about Jesus but, rather, evidence of what the men and women of this turbulent time believed about Jesus.
Although Hebrews is called a Letter, it is really more of a treatise. We do not know who wrote it. The author’s attitude to the Old Testament texts has much in common with that of the Jews of Alexandria, but this does not locate the treatise definitively. The author clearly wrote as if the full, complicated pattern of the liturgical year in the Temple, with all its observances and rituals, was in full swing. Had the Temple been a heap of ruins, he would surely have stated that this was the case, since it would have, tragically, so fitted his purpose: namely to demonstrate that the old faith had been supplanted by the death of Christ and his passing into the heavens as our true High Priest. So Hebrews is pre-AD 70 – one of the earliest New Testament books after the writings of Paul.
Hebrews has two beliefs in common with all the other New Testament texts: the belief that they were living at the end of time [Hebrews 1:2] and the belief that the Jewish religion, with all its longevity, its wealth of tradition, its past, was no more than a preparation for the coming of Jesus. Whereas the previous ‘witnesses’ of Jewish history existed in the world of literal history, Jesus had taken his followers out of story and ritual into the Truth itself. The author is clearly a Platonist of sorts who believes that what we see in this world is a shadow of the reality in heaven. But he focuses this view on the figure of Jesus: ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God’ [Hebrews 12:1–2].
The author tells us, then, that Jesus died on a cross, and that he is now in heaven. Moreover, the author sees the death of Jesus as the true reality, of which all the ceremonies in the Temple had only been foreshadowings. For, as the High Priest and his acolytes year by year offered sacrifices for sin, and entered in and out of the Holy of Holies, so now Jesus, our true High Priest, has died for our sins, washed us of our sins once and for all, and entered into the true Holy of Holies, namely heaven. The ritual formalism of Judaism and all its liturgical and scriptural tradition have merely been leading to this one temporal pivot, the death of Jesus on the Cross.
Had we been present at any crucifixion, including that of Jesus (and on one occasion Pontius Pilate had over two thousand Jews crucified), we would have seen a day-long humiliating torture in which a human being, whose flesh had been torn in wrists and ankles, was nailed to a wooden cross, dying eventually from asphyxiation. It is hard to imagine a more horrible death, nor one in which the dying person was more degraded. Yet early Christianity insisted upon seeing this appalling torture as a triumph by a victorious Christ. ‘Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.’ [Hebrews 10:19–22]
The author shares this view with Paul, who is our earliest Christian witness. Paul, who was an observant Jew who had originally been hostile to the Christian movement, had a blinding Apocalypse or Revelation which convinced him that Jesus, who had been crucified, was alive [Galatians 1:12]. Paul saw the death of Jesus as having done away forever with the entire Jewish Torah. Whereas in the past, humanity looked to save itself by slavishly following the moral code set forth in the Law, freedom was now poured out by God through the saving act of the Crucifixion. Through this disgraceful criminal death, humanity itself, Jews and Gentiles alike, is set free. ‘May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!’ [Galatians 6:14–15]
Paul told his Galatian converts (in modern-day Ankara) that his Apocalypse occurred some twenty years before he wrote the letter – which is dateable to around AD 50–51. In other words, his experience of a revelation of the risen Christ would have occurred soon after the actual Crucifixion of Jesus.
It is sometimes said, or supposed, that we have no evidence between the supposed date of the Crucifixion (AD 30–33?) and the writing down of the Gospels post-AD 70. But Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is an account of a visionary experience of Christ which took place very soon after the Crucifixion. His revolutionary interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’s death, had, he recalled twenty years later, scandalized his fellow Jews, even those who counted themselves as followers of Jesus. But lest it be supposed that Paul is worshipping a ‘Christ’ of his own invention, with no connection with the earthly, historical Jesus – whom many people in the years AD 50–55 could clearly remember – he makes allusion to the historical Jesus. For example, in his letters to the converts at Corinth, Paul alludes to the fact that the historical Jesus instituted the Supper, the Christian Sacrament, and that he forbade the remarriage of the divorced.
The earliest records of what men and women thought about Jesus, then, are not quite what you would expect. They are not memories of a simple teacher and healer. Rather, they are beliefs about his death on a cross – which must in reality have been a sordid, and pathetic sight, as crucifixion always was – as the key, saving moment of human history.
And, as for Hebrews, so in the earliest writings, there is a belief that Jesus pleads for us at the right hand of God. Writing to the Christians at Philippi from prison (perhaps from Rome in about AD 60?) Paul quotes a hymn:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Jesus Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. [Philippians 2:5–11]
This was the early testimony of what his followers believed about Jesus. How could anyone believe this about an earthly man, who was still remembered, and whose family were still the leading members of the Jerusalem church? One answer which we have already considered is that this early Church, this group of visionary Jews, created a type of the ideal Messiah; made up an image of suffering Judaism under the Roman tyranny; constructed from Scriptural texts a figure like the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, like the patient Job, like the ritual Priests of the Temple, and the Sacrificial Lambs which they were killing each Passover-time. If this is what these first Christians did, it was an extraordinarily complex and ingenious work of collective imagination, for all the evidence suggests that a far-flung group of people were involved in the exercise – Paul, or, if you think he was also an invented construct, the School of ‘Paul’, writing in Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece; Mark, probably constructing a Gospel in Rome; the Johannine School (possibly in Ephesus); the Jerusalem Church; and the author of Hebrews – all very different, all giving pictures of Jesus which differ, and even contradict one another in certain details, but all agreed on the story of his bodily resurrection and his power, through his death and resurrection and return to his Heavenly Father, to save us from our sins.
Stop reading for a moment and just consider what the spare – very spare – ‘evidence’ of the New Testament is telling us. It tells us that believers in Jesus Christ, stretching right back to the time of his death, were not holding him in their memory as the pacifist prophet imagined by Tolstoy or Ernest Renan. On the contrary. They sought the language of Scripture, poetry, symbol to express the belief that Jesus, hideously tortured and crucified by the Romans, had died, been buried and risen again.
The fact that they expressed these beliefs does not prove that the Resurrection actually happened.
The New Testament documents are only a testimony of what the early Christians believed. They produce no ‘evidence’ of the kind we should look for in a law court. But we are entitled to ask those who take the view that the documents are purely literary constructs, why any group of human beings would have invented this particular set of letters, Gospel narratives, hymns, apocalyptic visions? And, having invented them, be prepared to suffer and to die for them? I am not sufficiently imaginative to see how a group of writers sat down and decided to write, over a period of about forty years, a set of nearly thirty books which were a sort of exercise in literary ‘construction’, piecing together pictures of an imagined Jesus from Old Testament quotations. . . Clearly, one explanation is that they could have done so because Paul was deluded, in his original Apocalypse, but wrote and spoke about it so inspiringly that he convinced others. But Paul wrote of those who had adopted the faith of Jesus a good fourteen years before he ever met them: these were the Jerusalem Christians with whom he violently quarrelled, over the question of whether followers of Jesus should continue to keep the Jewish dietary laws and practise circumcision.
To the Corinthians [1 Corinthians 15:6], Paul claimed that, after the Resurrection, over five hundred witnesses in Jerusalem saw Christ. It is a problematic assertion, since no such multitude is recorded in any of the Gospels, but it is one of the earliest ‘witness statements’ about the Resurrection.
There have been any number of books of what L. would no doubt have called ‘archaeology’, trying to establish that the Resurrection actually took place. They have titles like Who Moved the Stone? No doubt such books were written with admirable intentions, but the Bible is not such a book. In the Fourth Gospel, there is the story of Doubting Thomas. When Jesus had appeared to the disciples, who were locked in an upper room a week after his death, Thomas (who was called the Twin) was not with them. When he heard of Jesus’s appearance, he refused to believe it.
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ [John 20:26–29]
The remarkable thing about this particular narrative is that it is the exact opposite of archaeological attempts to ‘prove’ the Resurrection. It says that those first witnesses were indeed witnesses to a stupendous event. But it was more blessed to belong to the later generations, who had not seen, but had begun to grasp the significance of the Christian faith. A similar point is made by Luke, in his story of the two men walking to a village called Emmaus, downcast after Jesus’s death. They were joined by a third with whom they talked of the sad events leading up to the Crucifixion.
Only when they entered their lodgings and turned in for the evening, and when the stranger made to leave them, did they ask him to join them. ‘When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him’ [Luke 24:30–31].
In both Gospels, they are not downplaying the astonishing physical fact of the Resurrection. They are not saying that it was something which had only happened in the imagination or in a spiritual sense. But in both cases, what was even more important than the first dawning wonder of the Resurrection itself was the continuing faith of the Church. The stranger, whom they so unaccountably had not recognized in the roadside, is known to the faithful in the breaking of bread.
What’s wrong with the idea of Jesus as a purely literary construct? Two things.
First, the messiness of the documentary evidence. Not all the texts fit into a previous Hebrew template, not every moment of the Gospels is a midrash on older scripture – though an amazing number are.
Take the earliest Gospel, perhaps written down forty years after the events it describes – perhaps in Rome. If you believe that it is an elaborate literary construct without any reference to history, then one of the most remarkable things about it is the ingenuity with which it gives names to even minor characters.
As we have already observed, there is no doubt that Mark – in common with most New Testament writers – places the story within a pre-existent Old Testament trope. So, we have read of Jesus, Son of David, following the exact pattern of the older story of King David, who, deserted by his followers, climbs the Mount of Olives in tears.
But then there is the story, a little later on, of Peter’s denial. Peter sat in the courtyard of the High Priest, warming himself by the fire, while Jesus was being interrogated within. And one of the servant girls remarked that she recognized him. He was one of the followers of Jesus. Peter denied it hotly. The assertion is repeated, and so is the denial. ‘Then after a little while the bystanders again said to Peter, “Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean.” But he began to curse, and he swore an oath, “I do not know this man you are talking about.” At that moment the cock crowed for the second time. Then Peter remembered that Jesus had said to him, “Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” And he broke down and wept.’ [Mark 14:70–72]
As well as being very moving, this passage is of great literary interest. Erich Auerbach, in his classic work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, writes, ‘A scene like Peter’s denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history – and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity.’
Auerbach’s magisterial book reminds us that the Bible was not alone in following known tropes, building up ‘new’ books by means of either imitating old ones, or in effect scissors and pasting. And this method of writing would go on right through the Middle Ages. Suetonius, writing The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, borrowed from the lives of Greek heroes. Likewise, when Einhard, in the ninth century, wanted to make Charlemagne seem Imperial, he borrowed chunks of Suetonius to describe him; and when Asser, some years later, wanted to write a book about Alfred the Great, he lifted whole phrases and anecdotes from Einhard. This makes it difficult to pin down the accuracy of the stories in any of these books, but no one for that reason supposes that the Twelve Caesars or Charlemagne or Alfred the Great were just literary constructs, still less that they did not exist. It was because they did exist, and were considered important, that the authors chose to dignify them in this particular way of writing.
The Gospels, which follow this practice, also contain material which is unlike this. Peter’s denial is only one example. Consider the moment later when Jesus, staggering under the weight of the Cross, which he is forced to carry to the place of execution, needs help: ‘they led him out to crucify him. They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus.’ [Mark 15:20–21]
It is hard to think of reasons why the author should have written these sentences in a book which is just a ‘construct’ of fictitious events. You could say he did so with deliberate intent to deceive, to add plausibility; that he was a strange mixture of, on the one hand, a creator of tropes – such as Jesus on the Mount of Olives – and a realist who added the details of Peter’s denial, or the name of the man helping to carry the cross to add plausibility.
But this in itself seems an inherently implausible thing to suggest. Is not the common sense understanding of how the sentences came to be written quite simply this: the community (traditionally thought to be the Church in Rome) who first heard this Gospel read aloud contained two individuals called Alexander and Rufus. That these two actually existed. In, let us say, AD 70, an author is saying to his audience, ‘You know those two forty- to fifty-year-olds who come to the Eucharist on Sunday – the pair of brothers – it was their father who helped to carry the Cross of Jesus.’
This makes us see that although the New Testament books are strange, and although they are not written as a modern writer would have composed them, they do contain evidence about the people who wrote them, and about the ‘witnesses’ who were still alive at the time of composition. Although, as we have perhaps said almost too often, they write about Jesus in a way which makes it all but impossible to ‘deconstruct’ the Scriptural tropes, the symbolic language, they do not write in this way about the witnesses. And the strangest thing is that even very late works, such as the Fourth Gospel, claim to have been written by witnesses.
After the last Resurrection appearance in that Gospel, in which, to parallel the three-fold denial, Jesus draws from Peter a three-fold assertion that he loves the Lord, there is a paragraph which has puzzled almost every reader. I do not propose a solution to any of the puzzles which it creates. I merely quote it as a reminder that, even in, let us say, AD 90 or 100, if you think this was when this Gospel was written down, the claim was being made that the testimony on which the Gospel was based relied on evidence of those who had actually known Jesus, and been present at the crucial moments.
Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, ‘Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?’ When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, ‘Lord what about him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ So the rumour spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’ This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. [John 21:20–24]
Long books have been written about the problems thrown up by these words, and this is not a long book. But we cannot escape the fact that even the Fourth Gospel, crafted and ‘literary’ and symbol-burdened as it is, claims to have been the work of one or more people (‘we know that his testimony. . .’) relying on the witness-account of the man who had reclined next to Jesus at the Supper. Though the material, the matter, of the Gospels, is historically intractable, it would be difficult to get closer to an ancient witness than this. And it is noticeable how frequently, and in how many books, this claim of eye-witness testimony is made. The Fourth Gospel claims from the beginning to be the work of one who witnessed the actual, earthly Jesus: ‘we have seen his glory’ [John 1:14], at the beginning, going right through to the end – ‘This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and who has written them, and we know that his testimony is true’ [John 21:24].
While I was writing the last two or three pages, I opened my Bible at Revelation, and an old letter from L. dropped out of it: she must have written it to me over twenty years ago – from Ghent, where she had gone to see the Altarpiece.
There is such calm. Van Eyck has chosen to depict the Lamb upon the Throne on a summer day in Flanders, one of those still days when you can hear bees buzzing from afar. Very different from the rather raucous rendering of the medieval hymn ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, which has ‘the song of them that triumph, the shout of them that feast’!
If only I could get on with the Bible book! I stood in front of Van Eyck for about an hour this morning and will go back this afternoon. But two things remain with me from my first viewing: the first, as I have said, is the stillness. He has managed, in paint, to convey that wonderful line ‘there was silence in heaven for about half an hour’ [Revelation 8:1].
The other thing is – the people! Who said the Western Front was intolerable because ‘my dear, the noise! And the people!’? Van Eyck’s heaven is beautiful not because of the lack of noise, but because of the presence of people. Do you remember Merton’s ‘Fourth and Walnut Revelation’, when he had been living for a long time as a solitary, but in 1958 he had to go into Louisville, Kentucky, for a doctor’s appointment? And on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, he had this ‘revelation’, a sense of oneness and love with all the people around him?
You know The Book – I mean, My Book – the book I haven’t written. (If I gave you my notes, maybe you could see a way of making it into a book?) Well, in that Book which never seems to get written. . . I have this idea of the Bible not being a dead text which is incomprehensible to us because it was written so long ago; and not a weapon to use against people we disapprove of. . . but this richly cherished source of inspiration to so many people! And it is partly the gift of God to his people, but also the gift of the people to God. They have fashioned it. They have read it. Wallace Stevens discarding the false images and reworking language itself is there in the crowd of witnesses, with Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, who remade and rediscovered the Bible’s spirit of prophecy, and the Emperor Justinian rebuilding Holy Wisdom as the greatest setting for liturgy the world had ever seen! And Thomas Merton is there, with his highly charged sense of the Holy Spirit. . . and the people of South Africa are there, who chose to be reconciled to their persecutors rather than massacring them; and Solzhenitsyn is there, with all the twenty million who suffered with him in the Gulag – and Akhmatova is there with her hymn of Requiem for the uncounted millions who died in the camps. . . Each of them, like Alyosha the Baptist in Ivan Denisovich, making the Bible anew for themselves, reciting it, living it, letting it change their lives, and in their turn changing it. Probably very sentimental, and you’d do it differently – and maybe a drier, more academic approach would be better? Perhaps something on Farrer/Ramsey and their readings of the Apocalypse?
In AD 70, the Roman armies occupied Jerusalem and destroyed it. Those who believed themselves to be living in the ‘last days’ must have felt vindicated. And those Jews who had engaged with the very earliest Christians, Jews and Gentiles, must have been given pause. For the destructive Roman soldiery had enacted what Paul and the Letter to the Hebrews had been saying a whole decade earlier: the old ceremonies, the old animal sacrifices, the cherished liturgy of the Temple could no longer be celebrated. History had supplanted them.
In the decades after the cataclysmic events of AD 70, the Jews scattered to join the Diaspora in North Africa, in Asia Minor and in Rome. In Asia Minor, one of their leaders was called John. He was a Jew who was steeped in the old calendar of Feasts – Tabernacles, Lights and Passover.
Who was he? We do not know. But there are clues. In about 190, there was a man called Polycrates of Ephesus who wrote a letter about a long-standing quarrel between the Church of Rome and the Churches of Asia about the date of Easter. The Eastern Christians celebrated Easter on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month Nisan, whatever day of the week that was – because it was the Passover. The Roman Christians had begun to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after 14th Nisan.
Polycrates belonged to a Christian family with memories of the very earliest Christians. He wished to make it clear to the Romans that his conservatism about the date of Easter was based on near-personal knowledge with the apostles themselves. Philip, who was one of the Twelve, had settled in Hierapolis with two of his daughters, and Polycrates gives more than a hint that he is descended from a third daughter. (There were four girls, according to Acts 21:9 – they ‘prophesied’.) He also spoke of ‘John, he who leaned back on the Lord’s breast, who was a priest wearing the high priestly frontlet (to petalon), both witness (martus) and teacher. He has fallen asleep at Ephesus.’
Polycrates named seven great Christian luminaries, all of whom kept Easter on Nisan 14th and with all of whom he claimed to be personally connected. John is the one who interests us here.
Describing John as the one who had ‘leaned on the Lord’s breast’ is a clear reference to the tradition that on the night before Jesus’s death, the disciple ‘whom he loved’ leaned on his breast [John 13:23; 21:20]. He is claiming that this Beloved Disciple observed Easter on 14th Nisan.
In Acts 4, we read of disputes between the Temple hierarchy and the followers of Jesus who proclaimed that he had risen from the dead. ‘The next day their rulers, elders and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest and Caiaphas, John and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family.’ [Acts 4:5–6] It is only speculation, but I find extremely convincing the suggestion made by Richard Bauckham that this John, of high-priestly family, is our man. It is clear that Polycrates did not believe that the author of the Fourth Gospel was John the Son of Zebedee, that is, one of the Twelve. The Beloved Disciple was none other than a son of the High Priest, one who was himself destined one day to wear the petalon, the high-priestly frontlet.
If this is true, of course, it suggests that the high priestly family themselves were eventually convinced of the truth of the apostolic teaching, and came to believe in the Resurrection. Either way, we have Polycrates’s authority for believing that the daughters of Philip, with their gift of prophecy, were originally members of the Jerusalem Church and moved to Asia where ‘they may well have brought Jewish and Jewish Christian apocalyptic traditions from Palestine into the circle of Christian prophets in Asia’.
The point is, not that one has to accept Polycrates/Bauckham’s theory of the identity of John, but that these books did not come from nowhere. The Book of Revelation is a testimony, a witness, made in the closing years of the first century by one who, even if he did not himself belong to the first generation of Christian believers, was closely in touch with those who did: and whose testimony is not that of the Victorian ‘Historical Jesus’ or ‘Jesus of History’. Not at all.
‘SEE, THE HOME OF GOD IS AMONG MORTALS.’ [Revelation 21:3]
Opening a book can sometimes be a life-changing experience. In Jeanette Winterson’s wonderful autobiography, she recorded, ‘I asked my mother why we couldn’t have books and she said, “The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.”’
No depiction of a reading experience is more dramatic, more terrible, more explosive, than the opening of the scroll in Revelation.
In the Authorized Version, the passage reads:
And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof? And no one in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon. And I wept much, because no one was found worthy to open and read the book, neither to look thereon. And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof. [Revelation 5:1–5]
The word used in Greek is biblion. The Book in the vision is a scroll-book, such as would have been seen in the cupboards of synagogues throughout this period, and not a codex, such as you are holding in your hand – either made of paper and card, or a simulated codex in electronic form.
The Book in this vision contains visions of What is To Come. It is a secret book, sealed with seven seals, and its interpretation is impossible for those who do not have eyes to see.
The only one worthy to open the seals is he who is seated upon the Throne. We have now become accustomed to Bible reading, so that we know how Scriptural writers, including the writers of New Testament Letters and Gospels, build up their narratives and effects by constant allusion to earlier Scriptures. In this Revelation, this Book about Reading a Book, the Book which Cannot Be Opened, there is a thick density of allusion. It is a unique book, a book without parallel in the New Testament. But it is also a book which gathers up many other experiences of Jewish Apocalypse. In some of these texts, such as the Book of Jubilees, and 1 Enoch, the visionary consults ‘heavenly tablets’ which contain secrets of the future. In the opening of the Book of Ezekiel, [1:4–14] the seer confronted four living creatures with the faces of a lion, ox, eagle and man. Here they are again, in Revelation, though with crucial variations. In the Book of Daniel, the prophet is called upon to interpret divine secrets and oracles. In the last such scene, as Belshazzar, the King of Babylon, and his court are blasphemously quaffing from the sacred vessels stolen from the Temple at Jerusalem, mysterious writing appears on the wall. Only Daniel can interpret the strange words – MENE, MENE, TEKEL and PARSIN – which prophesy the doom of Babylon and the imminent Persian invasion. In Daniel 7, the prophet has a vision in which the Ancient of Days is seated upon his throne, and one like a son of man comes down from the clouds of heaven to be given glory and kingship. He needs the help of heavenly visitants to determine what the vision means.
Undoubtedly, the seer who wrote Revelation has such passages from the older Scriptures in mind.
Austin Farrer, in his commentary, wrote:
What book is it? The setting is a heavenly synagogue, where Christ alone is able to open the Divine Law. But at the same time, the setting is that of Ezekiel’s first vision; Christ’s is that divine hand which spreads the book of prophecy before the eyes of his prophetic servant. Yet again, the setting is that of Daniel’s seventh chapter. It is a heavenly court; the ‘books are opened’ that judgement may be pronounced in favour of the Saints of the Most High. What, then, does Christ open? Is it the Torah? Is it prophecy? Is it judgement? And how can one book be all three? It is more; it is THE BOOK, it is all that a heavenly book can be, all that there is for Christ to unseal. It is what is meant when the Fourth Evangelist writes: ‘No man has seen God at any time; the Only Begotten who is in the bosom of the Father, he has expounded.’
Austin Farrer was an academic priest who spent all his professional life in Oxford, first as Chaplain of Trinity College, and later as Warden of Keble College until his death in 1968. He was a great pioneer of the method of reading the Bible which has largely guided this book of mine – inspiring, among hundreds of other pupils, my wife R.’s aunt Aileen Guilding to write her book The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship. For Farrer, described by Rowan Williams as ‘possibly the greatest Anglican mind of the twentieth century’, the Scriptures were both literary constructs and saving texts, aglow with living fire.
Academic theologians have seemed, roughly speaking, in my experience to fall into three categories. There were the ones who, having taken the Bible to pieces, found themselves without faith, and who continued to study it, aridly, as an academic discipline. If they had ever once heard the music of the spheres, they were now deaf to it. Often angered at their loss of faith, they were frequently hostile to the texts they studied, and determined to reduce or ridicule them.
Then there were those who kept their faith and their academic life in separate compartments. They continued to practise one or other version of Christianity on Sundays, and on Monday morning returned to accept the secularist agenda of the often heavyweight academics in my first category. These second-category divines were divided souls. A subsection of this category, perhaps the strangest of all, were those who practised all sorts of intellectual contortions to persuade themselves that certain undemonstrable propositions were true – for example, that the Last Supper was a Passover Meal, rather than merely accepting the Passover symbolism of the Eucharist and acknowledging that we do not know when the Last Supper was celebrated.
Then there was a (nowadays much smaller) category of theologian of whom Farrer, in modern Britain, was the Prince: those who recognized the Bible for what it was, who were entirely open and honest in their exegesis, but who never lost their awestruck consciousness of what they were studying. Farrer was in some ways a very rigorous, almost devastating analyst of Scriptural texts. He was also something of a mystic, a holy man, a man of God.
I packed his book on Revelation, A Rebirth of Images, to read on the train to Belgium and set off, on a very raw March day a couple of years ago. It was just impulse which took me. I thought that if I visited Ghent before Easter, I should be able to see the great altarpiece without having to battle my way through the crowds.
This, as it turned out, was a little optimistic. I arrived in the early afternoon. Flecks of sleet were falling from a lead-grey sky, and, having left my luggage at the modest hotel, I approached the cathedral, St Bavo, through a swarm of Japanese visitors. I had only a couple of days, and I intended to do nothing with my waking time other than look at this remarkable artwork, which I had been studying in books for a week.
On that first visit, about an hour before the cathedral closed for visitors, I was unable to get very near the masterpiece. Several guided tours were being told about it in different languages, including German, Japanese and American English – how it had been begun by Hubert van Eyck, who died in 1426, and completed by his brother Jan, how it had been commissioned for a rich Flemish merchant, and how, before the Reformation, the twelve separate panels were protected by panels which opened and shut by clockwork, and played music as they came open. The guides pointed out Adam and Eve in the top left and right panels, the angelic choirs in the next, and the great central panel at the top, flanked by one of the Virgin and one of St John, of the figure of God himself in a tiara, the three-tiered crown representing his triune nature.
It was easy to see, even during this first visit, how completely this painting embodied L.’s idea for her unwritten, and perhaps unwriteable, book. Reading is always a two-way process, even if you are reading a newspaper or a cheap crime story: there is the process of you absorbing the text, and of the text itself working some performative act, however briefly, upon the reader, amusing, boring, scaring the reader, and making her or him a different person. When the Reformation came to Europe, the Bible became a thing solely to be read, and printing created the illusion that it was a book like all other books, which could be placed on a library shelf. In the years before the Reformation, however, it was always clear that the Bible reads us as much as we read the Bible. It takes us into an imaginative world. It fills our minds with images of great potency which stay unexploded and unexplained in the mind for years before coming to life.
The Van Eycks’ masterpiece belongs to this last phase of human imaginative history before the invention of printing and the fissiparation of Europe. Literacy, which is essential when reading most books, is not necessarily an advantage to us when reading the Bible. We need to recover the capacity to absorb images, and this is what the Ghent Altarpiece so strikingly does.
I went back the next morning, and was part of the first swarm of visitors allowed into the chapel. When looking at the reproductions of the altarpiece, I had never taken any notice of the font-like well in the foreground. Around the fountain are the words ‘HIC EST FONS AQUAE VITAE PROCEDENS DE SEDE DEI ET AGNI’ – ‘This is the fountain of the water of life, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb’.
Farrer, whom I had been reading in my rather dingy hotel, had the idea that the Revelation/Apocalypse was the first book written by the Elder John. He was clearly a Jewish exile, presumably from Jerusalem – Bauckham speculates that he was actually a former priest of the Temple or even High Priest. He had jurisdiction, as a Christian archbishop, over seven churches of Asia and he had evidently been exiled – presumably during a Roman persecution following the destruction of Jerusalem – to the island of Patmos, where the vision occurred. Farrer then imagines that, after the fireworks of the Apocalypse, St John wrote the quieter version of the same story – his Gospel.
Many New Testament scholars have questioned whether the two books have the same authorship, but they do employ noticeably similar imagery – for example, the Lamb of God is a central image to both. Standing before the Ghent Altarpiece, I realized what the font-like structure was, from which flowed the waters of life.
‘It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.’ The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. [Revelation 22:16–17]
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 will never be thirsty. The water I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ [John 4:11–14]
I had returned in my mind to Nablus, and in a sense my journey around the Bible was all but complete.
The Christian Bible has travelled a long way from the Garden of Eden, where two beings appeared, by virtue of the fact that Almighty God decided to make ‘humankind in our image’ [Genesis 1:26]. We have passed through the entire history of Judaism, from its origins at the time of the Babylonian exile, its mythologies of ancestral desert-wanderings, its building of temples and its setting up of ritual observances. Following the catastrophe of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, religion itself, in its liturgical form, appeared to have been wiped off the board.
All those rules – about how, and when, and how many animals could be slaughtered; how this or that ritual impurity could be washed away; all the priestly and high-priestly rituals; all the sacred vessels, all the scrolls and books, and candlesticks, all the service books, all the musical instruments – are no more.
Perhaps the most imaginative feature of the Seer’s vision in the Apocalypse is that in the New Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem of his imagining, here too there is no religion. In the new dispensation, there is no more Shiite versus Sunni, no Buddhist versus Hindu, nor Catholic versus Protestant. ‘I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.’ [Revelation 21:22–24]
In other words, the condition of humanity which was envisaged in the very first chapter of Genesis has been achieved. Men and women and children are made in God’s image. The Law had been an attempt to cleanse humanity of its sins and flaws, but it could not do so.
For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. [Psalm 51:16–17]
I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. [Ezekiel 36:26]
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts [Jeremiah 31:31,33].
Christ did not come into the world to found a religion, but to make ‘religions’ superfluous.
On my last visit to the altarpiece, just after an unappetising brunch, the chapel had filled up, and was almost alarmingly full. I tried to concentrate on the sedate crowds of elders in Van Eyck’s masterpiece, but there were too many people behind, and in front of me.
I thought, there are different ways of reading the Bible, and not all of them involve sitting down on your own and turning the pages of a book.
The Bible is the Book of the People, and we understand it by listening to what other people have made of it. Some of these people are so different from us that it is quite inconceivable that we shall ever think in exactly their way. This does not mean we have nothing to learn from them. You do not have to eat the food of a different ethnicity every day of your life, but life would be dull if you had never sampled how the Lebanese, or the Goans, or the Italians like to cook. Likewise, the neo-Platonic philosophers and theologians of the early Church, or the Scholastics of the high Middle Ages, or the neo-Hegelians of the nineteenth century had mindsets so different from ours that we should have to perform mental contortions if we shared all their ways of looking at the world. This does not mean we have nothing in common with them – they were human too, and some of their insights can help us.
Just as I turned to go – the corner of my eye glimpsed a familiar head over the shoulders and backpacks of my swarming tourist-companions. The tilt of the head, the brindled hair, the sheer height, the bottle-glass thick specs were unmistakable. So was the smile. Often L.’s smile was annoying – in life – but on this occasion, it seemed merely comforting. I blinked, I straightened up my gaze to see her properly. Strangely, it was no more, nor less, surprising to see her here, after death, than it was to meet her in the haphazard unplanned method of all our previous meetings. But as I looked for her in the crowd, she was gone, and I was unable to decide, through all the hotel afternoon, when I finished Farrer and relapsed into a crossword puzzle, whether I had seen her, or only imagined her.
The next day was Palm Sunday and I returned to the cathedral to hear the whole of a Passion narrative (the chapters of one of the four Gospels describing the trial, torture and death of Jesus) sung by a group of different cantors. It is said that the chants used for this rendition derive from the music of the Temple in Jerusalem. Whether or not this is true, it is an extremely ancient chant, and the musical setting of the Gospel narrative, and the fact that we were listening to it collectively, rather than reading it on our own at home, made it much more vivid. I was not carried away by any mystic ‘experience’, but I was moved in my heart; for I realized with greater force than I had ever realized before that, merely because the text sung was a literary ‘construct’ , this in no way diminished its authenticity. Dissect it for historical evidence, and it would simply remain a handful of dead shards on a laboratory bench. Sing it together among a crowd of the faithful, and there seems no good reason not to recognize it for what it is: the testimony of the whole Church, living and dead. ‘They compelled a passer-by, who was coming in from the country, to carry his cross; it was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus. . .’ [Mark 15:21]
My eyes wandered from face to face in the congregation. The line is unbroken throughout the generations. Every Sunday since Alexander and Rufus went to the Eucharist in Rome, some group of Christians had been meeting for the same rite, to share in the same Mystery. When the chanting of the Passion was over, I stayed to hear that Fifth Gospel which I had heard when I visited the convent near Salisbury, with its great catalogue of witnesses. John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia and all your saints. . .
This miscellaneous Belgian congregation contained many foreign tourists from, I should guess, four continents. The liturgy in which they took part proclaimed the presence of the Risen Jesus Christ in the broken bread and the shared cup. Their actions, words and beliefs were in essence the same as those practised by the congregation which had included Rufus and Alexander in Rome, within memory of the man who had helped to carry Christ’s Cross. For hundreds of years before there was – as such – a book you could call the Bible, there were people passing on the tradition to the next generation. Alexander and Rufus. John who leaned on the bosom of the Lord at the Supper. As in any tradition conveyed by ritual and speech, there was a Chinese whispers effect; but the essence of it was very simple: the Crucified Lord rose. He returned to the Father in Glory. He left to his people his presence in the loaves. The loaves are his body. The people too are his body.
These people came before the Book. The Book is theirs. The Church came first – the gathering for the liturgy. Decades before there were written Gospels, Christians met together, sharing their faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Breaking of Bread – the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Liturgy, the Mass. They had a church order – elders or bishops and deacons – which they believed descended directly from the Twelve, chosen by Jesus himself. When it came to be written, after the Fall of Jerusalem, the Gospel tradition was spare. The writers did not write as modern biographers would have written. They told us almost nothing of a ‘biographical’ character about Jesus or about his mother Mary. A few stories about the infancy (the more fantastical Gospels, describing a wonder-working child, were rejected from the Canon); a selection of stories about his healing powers; a selection of his stories and the core of his teaching – to die to self, to distrust riches and hierarchy, to love one another. This meagre tradition was deemed by the early Church to be enough, and it was as if they did not want more than enough. The Johannine tradition – that it was more blessed not to have seen, and to have believed – is found in the other traditions too. This alone must surely give a sceptic pause. You would expect the tradition, if it were all fabrication, to make tall stories taller, and to have repeated wonders and miracles, rather than the tradition of Jesus, when alive, urging his disciples to keep his identity as the Messiah a secret, and when dead and risen, appearing in the most ambiguous ways – in at least three of the stories not even being recognized by those who had known him best. In the earliest of all the accounts, of the discovery of the empty tomb, that of Mark, the friends of Jesus flee from the empty tomb because they were afraid [Mark 16:8] and that is the end of the story. Artful indeed if it was all invention; understandable, if the sense of the risen Christ in the early Church was so palpable, in the gathering of the faithful, and in the Breaking of Bread, that they did not even need the reassurance of Resurrection stories.
The Books which the elders and scholars chose to put into our Bible, and those they chose to reject, when it was being compiled during the fourth to fifth century, were a human choice, though the collection has a mysterious wholeness and meaning. Frequent and deep reading of the Bible will not convince any reader that all of it is true, in the sense that literalists would use the term, but they will convince any imaginative reader to understand life and language anew through its pages. The Bible reminds us that all human language is metaphor, all expressions of metaphysical truth, or scientific truth, are in one sense mythological. The Bible does not compete with the metaphors of Science or Literature or Philosophy, but its own metaphors can inform life. The People who produced the Book had their own philosophies, their own understandings of science, which are not ours. The Book mysteriously remains, and whether we hear it used in liturgy or read it in private, it retains its undying luminosity.
Through all those two thousand years or so of experience, the understanding of the world, of time, of history and science, has varied enormously from culture to culture, and from age to age. The Bible, which became part of that culture after it had been formed into a single book, has also been understood and interpreted, from age to age, in quite different ways. Fundamentalist attacks upon it, and fundamentalist defences of it, have both, in their eerily similar ways, tried to make it into an ersatz Bible, an unchanging thing, graven in stone, stern and brainless, a lumpen edifice with THOU SHALT NOT carved over the door. It never was, and never has been, such a book. It contains much that is puzzling, much that is repellent, much that is alarming, as does the human soul. It is also an incomparably rich collection of writings, brought together by Providence to form a single whole, which both reflects and enlightens each life that reads in it deeply. It is the text of all texts, the book which underlies almost all the great works of Western literature from the time of its compilation, until the Enlightenment and beyond. Without a knowledge of it, the great portion of Western architecture is incomprehensible. It is the key which unlocks the work of nearly all the painters, from Giotto to Blake. It is the libretto of Bach and Haydn and Beethoven. On battlefields, on deathbeds, in hospital wards and private households rich and poor, its leaves have been turned, its pages opened, its well-known words have nourished and sustained countless human lives. In its poetry, men and women have found echoes of their own heartbreak, their own doubt, their own dejection, their own sins, as well as a staff to comfort and a light to guide. When Sir Walter Scott was dying, he asked his son-in-law to read to him. The son-in-law, Lockhart, who knew that Sir Walter had written so many books, and acquired so many more for his magnificent library, asked him – from which book? He said, ‘Need you ask – there is but one.’