Conclusion

CLOSED HISTORIES

All scripture is inspired by God.

2 TIMOTHY 3:16

THE TWO OR three centuries before Jesus’s time witnessed an extraordinary cultural and religious revolution, but that transformation is still barely acknowledged in historical writing, still less in popular perceptions. That lack of recognition tells us much about how we write the history of religions. We are not dealing with anything like a conspiracy of silence; rather, we face the difficulty of giving proper treatment to alternative historical paths, to historical might-have-beens.

That Crucible era thoroughly shaped the ways in which early Christians thought and acted. Contrary to many Christian assumptions, Jesus was rarely “telling the old, old story,” that is, grounding himself entirely in the Hebrew Bible. Historically, few nonspecialists have paid much attention to that period, which is so difficult even to name accurately. The “intertestamental period” sounds hopelessly arcane and academic. Partly, that lack of attention results from our inevitable reliance on scriptural sources, which for centuries were by far the most easily accessible and which largely created the standard narrative. In Protestant Bibles at least, Deuterocanonical sources were long relegated to the inferior category of apocrypha, while recent Bible versions exclude them altogether. In consequence, many Christians encountered what seemed like a gap in the centuries before Jesus’s time, a lengthy era consigned to an “age of expectation” and effectively a hole in the historical map.

Nor could that gap in continuity easily be filled by noncanonical sources, many of which have been discovered and made freely available only in quite recent times. That includes the Qumran materials as well as a wide range of Old Testament pseudepigrapha. And although scholars have long known critical texts like 1 Enoch, not until recently have its dating and context been well understood. Not only were the writings and ideas of the Crucible era neglected, but they were often treated with suspicion or hostility. The strict Protestant definition of the Old Testament follows that of rabbinic Judaism, which had little time for sources it deemed noncanonical. The consequence is a rather circular argument: by assumption, such scriptures have no place in the proper development of faith; therefore, they are not included in the familiar Bible, and therefore we exclude them from historical faith as we understand it. But to assert that ideas are not acceptable in faiths as they developed in later times does not mean that they were never significant or might not have become so given the appropriate circumstances.

I have remarked that using words like “sectarian” or “marginal” distorts our perception of historical development. In many religious contexts, and certainly not just in Judaism, we naturally speak of “mainstream” faith, which is often buttressed by terms such as “historic,” “traditional,” “orthodox,” or even “normal.” By definition, then, expressions of a religion that vary from the norm must be marginal, heterodox, or even abnormal. When considering such labels, though, we have to be conscious of multiple competing agendas. At any given time, any group wishes to portray its own ideas as authentic and mainstream and to dismiss its enemies as deviant. That temptation is all the greater when looking backward in time, after rival and “sectarian” ideas have withered or vanished utterly. Of course, claim the historians, what we have today is the norm, and it was always intended to be so. Alternative paths were historical blind alleys.

Religious groups in particular have an added agenda for making such boasts, with the claim that God actively intended the faith in question to follow one direction rather than another. That is how Christians treat rival currents such as Gnosticism, and it is how Jews view many of the “sectarian” ideas and scriptures of the Second Temple era. When encountering a word like “mainstream,” then, the questions should be “Whose mainstream? And when?”

If Second Temple Jews agreed on common core ideas, a great many aspects of faith and practice were contested at least by some faction or group. Indeed, some of the nonmainstream ideas and writings are difficult to fit into even a broad understanding of historical Judaism or its companion religions. Some of those ancient motifs survived; others did not. The existence of Satan and Hell endured, albeit in a much more nuanced form than in mainstream Christianity. The theory that Satan created or ruled the material world vanished, as did movements holding that view. Nor did groups succeed in maintaining the once popular view that it was possible to worship Jesus as Christ while also following Jewish ritual and dietary laws, including the practice of circumcision. Jewish Christians, like dualists, failed to survive. And once something no longer exists, there is little point in remembering it or indeed treating its achievements with any fairness or objectivity. In many cases, lost movements can be used as object lessons, painted as failed spiritual experiments or even sinister heresies, all consigned firmly to the margins of memory. Without actual believers, who is left to complain about such unfairness?

To illustrate this point, think about how we commonly visualize the development of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. One familiar metaphor imagines Judaism as the tree or trunk of which Christianity is an offshoot, and such botanical metaphors date back to early Christian times. Paul portrayed Gentile converts as being grafted onto the older and more cultivated tree or vine. But the tree-trunk image is problematic in suggesting solidity and uniformity, in a way that poorly fits the very diverse world of Judaism in the early Common Era. Other analogies include the crucible in which identities and beliefs are dissolved, until they are reshaped into any number of new forms. Or we can vary the biological metaphor to speak of multiple green shoots, each in its time growing successfully, although some would eventually overshadow the others.

TO RETURN TO Jesus’s parable of the man sowing wheat while his enemy scatters bad seeds, different beliefs grew together side by side, until it eventually became apparent which of them would flourish as wheat and which were doomed to perish as historical weeds.

A comparable historical hindsight shapes our approach to scripture. Jews and Christians alike base their faith in a venerated body of scriptures, which they believe to hold a consistent and coherent body of teachings, and these writings justify later doctrines and practices. In actuality, a sizable gulf separates the thought-world of the Hebrew Bible from historic Judaism and Christianity. However, religions are well accustomed to absorbing and accommodating such inconsistencies.

They also adapt their understandings to take account of evolving doctrines and insights. However explicit a scripture might be on its surface, believers read it through the eyes of faith and through understandings that emerged after the actual time of composition. Christians, for instance, tend to read every gospel as if it contains the fully developed doctrines of the Virgin Birth and resurrection, even when the text in question might have little or nothing to say on that particular subject. On a larger canvas, Christians and Jews daily mine the Old Testament for doctrines that the text does not contain or at least not in any developed form. This is a legitimate strategy for believers or faith communities seeking spiritual enrichment, but one that has to be used with great care in any kind of historical approach.

Anyone interested in those scriptures, in the Bible broadly defined, should also be interested in the substantial body of writings that survive from the Crucible years, which provide the critical transition between the cultural and spiritual worlds of the Old and New Testaments. Without suggesting that apocryphal and alternative texts should be granted canonical status today, their historical importance is great, and in the case of the Enochic writings, it is overwhelming. Virtually all these texts are now easily available in readable versions, mainly on the Internet, but they are also accessible in published collections.

Rich resources are now available for anyone who wishes to see how ideas such as angels and Satan appeared or who seeks to explore such once popular writings as the book of Jubilees, the Psalms of Solomon, the Assumption of Moses, or the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. For Christians, these are the lively voices breaking through the supposed divine silence of the intertestamental period. Quite apart from any literary merits they might possess, their historical appeal for both faiths should be irresistible.

I HAVE SPOKEN of forgotten movements and lost scriptures. Equally consigned to oblivion are the eras that produced them. Nonspecialists know that mighty cultures flourished in Greek and Roman times, but few could say much about what happened to those societies during the long centuries that separated Alexander the Great from the emperor Augustus, roughly from 323 BCE through the time of Christ. To put that in context, that 350 years is the time span that separates us today from, say, the English conquest of New Amsterdam from the Dutch or the final Ottoman Turkish efforts to overrun central Europe. The Roman Empire is a familiar historical reality, and anyone interested in the world of the New Testament realizes that that entity provides the essential political context for the beginnings of Christianity. Yet very few nonacademics have even heard of the once sprawling and wildly creative Seleucid or Ptolemaic empire. If asked to name a specific historical event from this era, Jews and Christians alike might well name the Maccabean revolt against an evil king, although few could likely pinpoint the actual state that he ruled.

Yet those centuries created the ideas, assumptions, and writings that shaped later faiths. This epoch gave us the kings and priests who determined later concepts of religious heroism and villainy: they were the originals from which were drawn so many images of messiahs and devils, martyrs and antichrists. Without knowing that Crucible era, any exploration of Jewish or Christian origins is a journey without maps. Or to change the metaphor, historical Christianity and Judaism seem to spring out of nowhere, worlds without roots.

Without knowing those roots, Christians and Jews are destined to endless misunderstandings and suspicions about their origins. Christians will continue to frame the Jews of Jesus’s time according to the narrowest stereotypes of the Old Testament world, without seeing the true range of ideas and beliefs, so many of which were held by the primitive church. Jews and secular scholars alike will exaggerate the Gentile and Greek quality of so much of early Christianity and underplay its thoroughly Jewish quality. Without those roots, we can comprehend neither the Bible nor the faiths that grew from it.

The Crucible age is the indispensable past of the religious worlds we know.