The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Yet the emphasis on education can be seen as a benefit. It is relevant to quote from a speech by King M’Tesa of Uganda:The Arabs and the white men behave exactly as they are taught in their books, do they not? The Arabs come here for ivory and slaves; as we all know they do not always speak the truth and they buy slaves, putting them in chains, beating them and taking them far away to sell. But when white men are offered slaves they say ‘shall we make our brothers slaves? No. We are all sons of God.’ When the explorers Speke and Grant came here, they behaved well. Indeed I have not heard a white man tell a lie yet. I say that the white men are greatly superior to the Arabs and I think, therefore, that their book must be a better book than Mohammed’s.

  There must have been some authoritarian, brutal missionaries. Accounts of various missions are scarce. There will always be the divide between those who see the missionaries as prejudiced and interventionist, out to destroy an existing culture, and those who see them as bringers of light, who prepared the way for their inevitable takeover by the rampaging West.

  What happened, in my view, is that the idea of empire and especially the British Empire, because it was the biggest and the most recent, got such a bad name that its reputation stained that of the missions. All empires have always behaved badly which does not mean that everything within them is bad. Moreover in the UK Christianity waned rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, after the British Empire was finally dissolved, and there grew in strength a sense of disillusionment, almost of being cheated, which contaminated everything to do with Christianity. And the voice of the non-believers grew louder in the land and became more acceptable and energising for the media. The novelty of their zest recalls the early evangelicals.

  None of this, I think, should take away from the efforts of valiant and often good people to bring to quarters of the world they considered in peril the opportunities to embrace a religion, in the New Testament, of high morality and kindness. That it failed on many occasions is not especially surprising, given its entanglement with the lusts of empire-building and the complications of civilisations which they encountered and of which they knew very little at the outset. That it succeeded could be regarded as a loss or a gain depending on your point of departure. That it, the Word of God in the King James Bible, sent out across the world cohorts of outstandingly brave and virtuous people and that some good came of it can hardly be denied.

  But to Christians, these missions were all admirable and their results a testament to the glory of God. That there have been setbacks is disappointing but they should not be a cause of despair. The missions go on. The Bible they believe dwells in eternal life. The world still has to be saved and by repeated efforts Christians believe that it will be saved. Such is the prayer and the faith of the dedicated today who find inspiration in these early attempts to spread the Word.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE BIBLE AND SEX

  When men began to look for ways to control society, language, firepower and sex followed fear as the best available methods. The Bible is packed with examples of both fear and sex. God exemplified the authority to crush and terrify: the characters in the Bible provide a gallery of sexual activities which could be examined for many a different version of heaven or hell.

  There was polygamy among the most respected patriarchs; there was incest and the prostitution of daughters by their fathers. There were mass rapes. There were banning orders on a range of sexual activities which were successfully broken, often to positive and much applauded effect. Adultery was practised and denied. Seduction was an art which could either further or thwart the will of divine destiny. The erotic was celebrated in sexually abandoned verse so lightly disguised that a fig leaf would have seemed like an overcoat. There was the repudiation of all eroticism. There was the introduction of sin to sex and guilt to sin. Then, for the brave, a sensual and dark engagement with the brew of guilt, sin and sex, more dangerous eroticism spurred on by such dramatic constraints. The Bible has provoked a multitude of variations, often to spite it, sometimes in the strict obedience to it.

  There were heroines of sexual liberation and hordes of women condemned to sexual servitude. Sexual meekness was a bond and a virtue but it also became an object to desire in itself, heightened further by protestations of chastity. There is prostitution and celibacy, orgies and the love between men which is accepted and sex between men that is abominated. There is onanistic sex for which the Lord slaughters you. There is a fuse of mystical sex with the divine Creator of all things visible and invisible. There are detailed lists of prohibitions which imply much licentiousness and rampage. There is sexual assault and tenderness, cruelty, the wreckage of jealousy and the severe duty to breed, protect and build up family. We read of Eve begetting the human race in original sin according to St Augustine; Mary conceived of Christ in immaculation to redeem and to save the human race, according to the Gospels; and Salome the slut.

  Interpretations of what these and other women represent fill volumes, from phallocentric essays to the relatively recent scholarly counter-attacks by feminist authors. There is in the Bible almost all that sex can offer: and the King James Version’s ubiquitous availability over the four centuries has broadcast it far and wide.

  The classicist author, Edith Hamilton, has written that the Bible is the only book in the world up to the twentieth century which looks at women as human beings no better and no worse than men. The Old Testament writers, she argues, described them just as impartially as they did men, free from prejudice and even from condescension.

  Eve is born out of the body of Adam to be the mother of the human race. Yet when she yields to the beguiling serpent and eats the apple she condemned that race, according to the early commentators. In some ways the story of the history of the Bible is how it is able to fit the story to the changing face of authority. The Middle Ages especially targeted Eve for this original sin because it suited their rule, and Milton took it up in Paradise Lost.

  Eve was punished for this sin, as forever after was woman. Hers was to be a life of sorrow and pain in childbirth and child loss and unquestioning obedience under the heel of her husband. Men who wanted to keep women in domestic slavery invoked the spoiling of the Garden of Eden at every turn: women, when they were allowed their full public voice, pointed out that Eve was created out of a man: all men and women since were created out of women. But Eve became the exemplar of satanic sexual temptation’s greatest triumph: ‘and the serpent beguiled her, and she did eat.’ From then on, until deep into the modern age, woman was cast as the temptress, the untrusted, the seducer, the sexually rapacious, ungovernable, to be kept chained. An extreme of this was in ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ (The Hammer of Witches), in which two German Dominicans, in 1486, took the central notion, as they saw it, of the sin of women, to launch three centuries of persecution of ‘witches’.

  Eve became the temptress long before the Bible was translated into the King James Version. All the women discussed in this chapter have histories which precede 1611. But the printing and the unprecedented distribution of the Bible to the ambitious, increasingly populous and avidly literate English-speaking world brought Eve and other biblical women to a wider, a more interrogative, a more intrigued public than ever before.

  Biblical women were irresistible to writers. High culture stepped up to the plate from John Milton’s Samson Agonistes to Oscar Wilde’s and Cavafy’s Salome. Popular culture weighed in through films – from All About Eve to the Last Temptation, which portrayed Mary Magdalene as Eve’s direct prostituted heiress. There were popular songs, from ‘Jezebel’ to ‘Delilah’. And in the layering of many novels, plays and poems we find direct and glancing references to Mary the Mother of God, to Ruth, to Jezebel in Lesley Hazleton’s trilogy Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen, and the many accounts that include Mary Magdalene. Sex and the treatment of women were widely discussed after the King James Version made its way.

  One claim, which came after 1611, was th
at Adam and Eve hold out the model for monogamy. One woman is created for one man. Eve is wrested from Adam’s rib which emphasises that they were once one. As they will be again. ‘Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.’ And in 1 Corinthians xi, 11 – 12, Paul says: ‘For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman.’

  The consensus today is that Eve has been sinfully misused. Pamela Norris in her book Eve: A Biography argues that the story of Eve has been used consistently ‘to manipulate and control women’. Eve has also become a repository of male fears and fantasies. The story of Eve, to modern feminists, is the source of patriarchal misogyny in Christianity. The accusation in Genesis was that she had been tempted to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil despite being forbidden to do so by God. That act was the root of all wickedness and for that alone women must be kept subject to men. It was very convenient for men.

  Then there is Hagar. The story of Hagar has grown in the consciousness of Christians over the last three centuries partly because of its resonance in the African-American Christian communities.

  Sarah, wife of Abraham who was to be the fountainhead of not one but three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – could not conceive. She offered her slave Hagar to Abraham who takes her, and a child is born, Ishmael. Sarah in her envy torments Hagar but she stays to be with the child. Some years later, Sarah conceives and Isaac is born. Sarah then forces Abraham to drive out Hagar and Ishmael with minimal provisions, destined for death by hunger. But Hagar’s prayer to God saves them and they continue to live – though they stay outside society in the wilderness.

  Hagar was victimised by the great commentators from St Augustine – who wrote that she symbolised the sinful condition of humanity – to Thomas Aquinas and John Wycliffe, who wrote that the children of Sarah were to be redeemed but the children of Hagar were ‘cursed by nature and mere exiles’, and were not to be redeemed.

  This transparent and (by non-patriarchal standards) grotesque injustice has since been recognised. In America, several black feminist biblical historians have seen Hagar as someone with whom it is easy and important for former slaves to identify. She is seen as a slave forced into a pregnancy for the convenience of Abraham and the determination of Sarah that he should fulfil his dynastic destiny. Then she is expelled for no fault of her own, out of jealousy and the possessiveness of the non-slave wife when she has no need for her. She is, like the African-American slaves, a thing, an object, to be used at will and rejected when the use is over and thrown out without a thought for her future life or that of her child.

  The theologian Dolores S. Williams writes:Hagar has ‘spoken’ to generation after generation of black women because her story has been validated as true by suffering black people. She and Ishmael together, as family, like many black American families in which a lone woman/mother struggles to hold the family together in spite of the poverty to which ruling class economics consign it. Hagar, like many black women, goes into the wide world to make a living for herself and her child with only God by her side.

  Hagar is a perfect example, I think, of how the contradictory and clashing nature of the Bible can re-address the world across the centuries. The Hagar ‘story’ was changed utterly by a reading radically at odds, scarcely even resembling, the original and acclaimed progress of Abraham and his seed. The one does not eradicate the other but it stands in powerful opposition to it.

  Sarah is the establishment, the ruling caste, Hagar the slave, the abused outsider but also the survivor. These women bring other dimensions to the portrayal of women in the Bible. Though driven by procreation, it is not simply the gender and sex of Eve which shadows and colours other strong biblical women. As with Sarah and Hagar the context is vital. Sarah the unbearably barren and then unbearably jealous wife, only to become a competing mother is still with us now. Hagar’s casting off is common.

  Salome and Jezebel are more to be thought of as the expected daughters of the old Eve. Each of them has been revisited by modern feminists with rich rewards. We see how the characters become a caricature which fitted the dominant male culture of the time: more intriguingly, we are afforded subtler and plausible interpretations of the lives and actions of these women. Jezebel for example is traditionally a lustful unlicensed worshipper of the goddess of love who lured upstanding Israelites from their own God to Baal through her deployment of temple prostitutes. An evil power behind the throne, Jezebel is thrown, literally, to the dogs by fanatics. A modern reading sees her as an assertive woman baited and foully murdered by representatives of a male-dominated religion.

  Judith gives us another strand: the use of sexuality to achieve greatness through service to her people. When Nebuchadnezzar’s Persian army lays siege to Bethulia, the inhabitants think that God has abandoned them. Judith, a wealthy and beautiful widow, leaves the town at night, seeks out the leader of the army, Holofernes (perhaps by posing as a prostitute?). She makes him drunk, hacks off his head, returns to the town and displays the severed head on the ramparts. The Persians panic: the Israelites charge out and slaughter them.

  Judith is a heroine.

  She was an example of the warrior queen, a woman as brave, cunning and successful in war as a man. She must have seduced Holofernes even if only through conversation and promises; she must have used those wicked feminine arts so feared and despised by the men who had cast women into the outer darkness and stigma of sinful sex. Yet her story rises above that. Judith is the most unexpected woman in the Bible: virtue and courage and leadership as an effective troika.

  Mary Magdalene provokes inexhaustible reappraisals. Her presence in the life of Jesus Christ is unique. If we track her story, we begin in the Gospel according to St Luke. He reports that Jesus ‘went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him. And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.’ Mary seems to be a woman of substance. As was to happen repeatedly over the next 2,000 years, women of a certain education and wealth were important early supporters of the Apostles and their heirs and successors.

  There are four accounts of Mary Magdalene being present at the crucifixion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all refer to her. Luke and Matthew report that she was there when the body of Jesus was sealed in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea; she could confirm that he was dead and she prepared the spices needed for the proper burial. Most significantly of all, according again to all four Apostles, it was Mary Magdalene who was the first person to see the risen Jesus, the first witness to the greatest of all miracles. This was the Christian proof of the God-in-Christ, the Resurrection with its promise of life everlasting. It was shown first before all others to Mary Magdalene. It was Mary Magdalene who told Peter and the other Apostles ‘He is Risen’ – this again recorded in all four Gospels.

  She had an outstandingly privileged and unique role in what for Christians is the stem narrative of their faith. Yet the curse of Eve has been on her until quite recently. She has been represented by male commentators and film makers, lasciviously and certainly voyeuristically, as a prostitute, albeit an ultimately repentant prostitute. Much more damning that she should have been a prostitute. It fits in with centuries of stereotyping. It also encompasses the wishful thinking of some men whose constructs of sin and sex have seen and still see prostitution as an exciting and irresponsible access to carnal pleasure.

  Scholars have looked in the Apocryphal texts and found a different story. They often contain evidence which seems as reliable as that which was waved through into the New Testament. In the Apocrypha, Mary Magdalene is portrayed as ‘The Apostle to the Apostles’ – which makes sense of her several key appearances in the Christ story. In some texts she is de
scribed as a visionary and a teacher of the early movement, and one who was loved by Jesus more than all other disciples.

  We could be forgiven for seeing a conspiracy theory here: perhaps the excision of the Apocryphal books was not prissiness but yet another attempt in the institutional Church’s ignominious history of reshaping the Word of God to suit the earthly politics of the men who led and ran the institution. These cuts arouse legitimate suspicions that a woman of such significance in the life and work of Christ disturbed the early Church’s ordering of things too much to be tolerated. In several Gnostic Gospels, for instance, Mary is seen as a special disciple of Jesus who has a deeper understanding of His work and is asked to interpret it to the other disciples.

  Even with just the evidence we have in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, her ‘specialness’ is unquestionable. Her closeness to Christ undeniable. Her maternal support for him is a stated fact. Not a big leap to speculation that she was more educated than the fishers of men who formed the core of the twelve? More used to the discussion of ideas? Not unlikely. Nor is it at all unlikely that had the centrality of Mary Magdalene been acknowledged and celebrated from the beginning of the written Gospels then perhaps the history of Christianity and certainly the history of women in Christianity would have been radically different.

  Was Mary Magdalene rubbed out to preserve a monopolistic male mafia? It is within the bounds of possibility and the psychology of those who decided to organise a work that became such an attractive and substantial force in the empire. Organisers are often at a distance from the activists, the doers. The Church of wealth, the Church that crowned emperors and excommunicated kings had to be a matching Church militant in those masculine societies. A woman as favoured by Christ as Mary, perhaps a woman of independent mind and means, was not helpful.