Transgression
Page 35
Not just one big thing. Not even two big things. Three big things—the Jesus movement, the Jewish revolt, and the birth of rabbinic Judaism.
And they were related.
My gut instincts told me that the Sunday-School version of those three things wasn’t quite right.
As I dived into my research, I found that my instincts were correct. I discovered an amazing and exciting world. I felt sure that many people would care about this world if only they could see it the way I saw it.
In my City of God series, I hope to show you more of that world. Have fun! Here are the books that I’ve written so far in this series:
Book 1: Transgression (A.D. 57)
Book 2: Premonition (A.D. 57-62)
Book 3: Retribution (A.D. 62-66)
Notes
1. Cell phones were very big in Israel. This story is set in the summer of 2000, when not every American had a cell phone.
2. It’s based on the Casimir effect. Every speculative science novel has some fakery where you have to wave your hands and make things up. This is my fakery spot. The Casimir effect is real. So are electric fields. Negative-energy is what is supposed to make the wormhole work. Condensates are real. What is fiction is that all of this could be put together into a macroscopic wormhole.
3. Christianity in the late Middle Ages was in the process of inventing science. This may be true, although it’s impossible to prove. It seems clear that medieval Christian philosophers, believing in a rational universe governed by God’s laws, did contribute to the birth of modern science.
4. On that date, Paul of Tarsus came riding into Jerusalem. Damien is being a bit naive here. There is no exact chronology of the life of Paul, so we can’t know for certain what date he entered Jerusalem. But the most probable dates are in the window A.D. 56 to 58, so he’s close. Damien is sloppy in his research, but history isn’t his field.
5. “We are very much Jews.” Of course, this is the main problem Jews have with Messianic Jews—the claim that they can be both Christians and Jews simultaneously. The standard Jewish position is that Christians are idolators because they worship a second god, Jesus, who can’t possibly be the Jewish God because it is impossible for God to become incarnate.
6. He never existed as a man. A surprising number of educated people believe that Jesus never actually existed. Virtually no professional historians take this stance. Ari has adopted an unusual variation of this idea, which has even less support among scholars.
7. You think the Holocaust was an aberration? Ari is correct here, as far as he goes. There is a long history of Christian persecution of Jews, going back far earlier than the Inquisition. But Rivka is certainly correct that the very earliest members of the Jesus Community were Jews. The earliest version of Christianity was thoroughly Jewish. There’s a disconnect between that early Jewish Jesus Community and the later Gentile antisemitic Church. The City of God series is about that disconnect.
8. A Chronology of Paul. Once again, Damien has been sloppy in his research. He found Robert Jewett’s excellent book, A Chronology of Paul’s Life, and made the assumption that Jewett’s chronology was 100 per cent accurate.
9. A hundred rolls of film. In 2000, cameras with film were still widely used, although digital cameras were becoming more common. However, the resolution of digital cameras was still inferior to film.
10. Why was mathematics so “unreasonably effective,”—Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner wrote an influential paper in 1960, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”
11. Philosophy was a crock. Damien is taking a viewpoint common among working scientists—that philosophy is useless. This is itself a philosophical position, because part of philosophy is the study of itself. So technically, Damien’s opinion is self-refuting, although he wouldn’t really care.