by Peter Watson
84. Ibid., page 59.
85. John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1989, page 8. Richard Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, Circa 530–470 BCE, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
86. Ibid., pages 263–264.
87. Hall, Op. cit., pages 32–33. But many sculptures were painted: see Cook, Op. cit., 151 for a discussion.
88. Hall, Op. cit., page 30.
89. Grant, Op. cit., page 279.
90. Ibid., page 280.
91. Ibid., page 224.
92. Ibid., page 281.
93. Walter Burkhart, The Orientalizing Revolution, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992 (1984 in German), passim.
94. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, London: Free Association Books, 1987/Vintage paperback 1991, page 51.
95. M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. West says that Egyptian literary influences on Greece are ‘vanishingly small’ but Peter Jones, Op. cit., page 225, says that though many details in Bernal’s account are absurdly exaggerated, much of his general argument is sound.96. Isaiah Berlin, Liberty (edited by Henry Hardy), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pages 302–303.
97. Ibid., page 294 and ref.98. Ibid., page 304.
99. Ibid., page 308.
100. See Peter Jones (editor/director), The World of Rome, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997, page 289, for Zeno’s paradox.
101. Berlin, Op. cit., page 310.
102. Leveque, Op. cit., pages 328ff.
103. Berlin, Op. cit., page 312.
104. Ibid., page
105. Grant, Op. cit., page 263.
106. Translated by Erwin Schrödinger in his Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism, Op. cit., page 19.
CHAPTER 7: THE IDEAS OF ISRAEL, THE IDEA OF JESUS
1. Johnson, History of the Jews, Op. cit., page 78.
2. Ibid., page 82.
3. Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorised Version, New York: Knopf, 1991, page 71–72. See Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 120–121, for the Israelites’ uneasy relationship with YHWH.
4. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 70. Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 323.
5. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 56.
6. Johnson, Op. cit., page 83.
7. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 275.
8. Johnson, Op. cit., pages 84–85.
9. Ibid., page 85.
10. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 85.
11. Ibid., page 107. Richard Friedman argues that it was Ezra who gave the final shape to the Law of Moses; see Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 310.
12. Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools, London: SPCK, 1998, page 24.
13. Ibid., page 7.
14. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 109.
15. Ibid., page 10.
16. Ibid., page 116.
17. Philip Davies argues against this. He maintains that the final form of Hebrew scriptures tells us nothing about their evolution. Davies, Op. cit., pages 89–90. In fact, these three divisions of Old Testament writings describe four phases of Israelite history: the ancient history of the world and the election of the ancestors of Israel (in Genesis); the creation of the nation, from the descendants of Jacob in Egypt and the Lord’s gift of a constitution (law) and land; a period of decline, from the leadership of Moses, through Joshua and Saul to David and Solomon, and then through the less than ideal monarchies of Israel and Judah, culminating in exile in Babylon (Exodus to Kings and Chronicles); the restoration of Judah, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the reconstitution of Judah/Israel as a religious entity ‘devoted to the convenant with Yahweh and to worship in his temple’. At this point canonised history ends, though of course Jewish history does not end. For Christians, Judaism comes to an end theologically, with the birth of the Messiah. Ibid., page 55. The word ‘Jew’ comes from the Hebrew yehudi, Judahite or Judaean, a descendant of Judah, Jacob’s fourth son and heir, ‘the historical carrier of the Blessing of Yahweh, first given to Abram (Abraham)’. Allen Bloom, Closing, Op. cit., page 4.It is worth remembering that the Christian Old Testament is arranged differently from the Hebrew Bible. The first five books are in the same order but have different titles. The Christian Genesis is the Hebrew Bereshith, ‘In the beginning’; the Christian Numbers is the Hebrew Bemidbar, ‘In the wilderness’. Hebrew practice, like the files of Microsoft Word, means they often take their titles from the first words of the chapter. After the Torah, or Pentateuch, there is little in common in the order of the books between the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. The Christian Old Testament ends with Malachi proclaiming a new Elijah, a new prophet, whereas the Hebrew Bible ends with the second book of Chronicles, the return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple.
18. Allen Bloom, Op. cit., pages 4–5.
19. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 246ff
20. Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, London: Routledge, 1996, pages 128–129.
21. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 81ff.
22. Israel Finkelstein, personal interview, Tel Aviv, 22 November 1996. But see also: Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 72ff.
23. Amihai Mazar, personal interview, Tel Aviv, 22 November 1996.
24. Raz Kletter, personal interview, Tel Aviv, 25 November 1996. Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, volume 2, New York: Doubleday, 2001, pages 200–209. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 246ff, also argue that the move to worship YHWH exclusively began only in the late eighth century BC.
25. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 129.
26. Anne Punton, The World Jesus Knew, London: Olive Press/Monarch Books, 1996, page 182.
27. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 197.
28. Ibid., page 16. Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., pages 36ff.
29. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 19.
30. Ibid., page 21.
31. Ibid., pages 58–59. See Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 44–45, for the role of Abraham, the rise of Jerusalem and other consequences of the E and J versions. See also Thompson, Op. cit., pages 105ff for the world of Genesis.
32. Harold Bloom, the American scholar, has argued that in fact J is the earliest element of the Old Testament, the origin of the scriptures, and, moreover, that its author was a woman. Commenting on a new translation of the J elements, he argues that this tenth-century woman conceived Yahweh more as a Greek or Sumerian god–highly anthropomorphic: exuberant, mischievous, capricious, ‘an outrageous personality’. Bloom conceives the Old Testament as an amalgam analogous to a mixture of Homer and Hesiod. This all adds to the concept of the evolution of God, discussed in the previous chapter. David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom, The Book Of J, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, page 294.
33. Johnson, Op. cit., page 91.
34. Punton, Op. cit., page 83.
35. Ibid., page 209.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Jean-Yves Empereur, Alexandria, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001/2002, page 38.
39. Punton, Op. cit., page 102.
40. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 123. See also: R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913.
41. Punton, Op. cit., page 217.
42. A final element in the scriptures was the Oral Torah. This arose because, for all its authority, the written Torah did not–could not–account for all situations. For example, it allowed for divorce but did not specify what form divorce should take, nor how it should be arranged. Interpretation and explanation of the law thus proliferated and with it developed an oral tradition. In time, this oral tradition became as canonical as the written Torah and scholars with phenomenal memories devoted their lives to memorising and passing on this traditio
n (these men were called Tanna’im). Eventually, however, this body of tradition became so unwieldy that it, too, had to be written down. It was a move also provoked by two disasters that had befallen the Jews–the destruction of the second Temple in AD 70, and the failed revolt against Rome in AD 131–135. After the failed revolt, the Jews were so shattered, and so dispersed, that it seemed the oral tradition might be lost. In these circumstances Judah the Prince, a rabbi, decided to make it his life’s work to record and organise all the important oral traditions. He and his colleagues completed the work by AD 200 and this work is called the Mishnah. It covers the food laws, ritual purity, festivals and Temple practice, marriage and divorce, adultery and civil rights. Punton, Op. cit., page 20.
43. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 167ff.
44. Davies, Op. cit., page 176; Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 200. See also: F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1952.
45. Johnson, Op. cit., page 93.
46. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 402.
47. Ibid., page 410.
48. Ibid., page 412. See Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 78, for another way Job is special–its division into prose and poetry, and the significance of this.
49. Punton, Op. cit., page 192.
50. Johnson, Op. cit., page 99.
51. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, London: BBC, 1969, page 19.
52. Johnson, Op. cit., page 102.
53. Ibid., page 106.
54. Paula Fredericksen, From Jesus to Christ, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, page 87.
55. Colleen McDannell and Barnhard Lang, Heaven: A History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, pages 12–13.
56. Frederiksen, Op. cit., pages 88–89.
57. Christopher Rowland, Christian Origins, London: SPCK, 1985/1997, pages 72–73.
58. Rowland, Op. cit., page 73; Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 89.
59. Rowland, Op. cit., page 88.
60. Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 82.
61. Ibid., page 93.
62. Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 265.
63. Rowland, Op. cit., page 94.
64. Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 77. The Apocryphal Testaments of Levi and Reuben speak of a priestly as well as a Davidic Messiah, and this is confirmed in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
65. Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 78.
66. Johnson, Op. cit., page 111.
67. Ibid. But see Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 316 for the power of the Bible in unifying the disparate Israelites.
68. The incense for the perpetual altar flame was made from a secret recipe by the Avtina family, whose women never wore perfume, so they could never be accused of corruption.
69. Johnson, Op. cit., page 116.
70. Some idea of the size of the sacrifices may be had from the fact that there were thirty-four cisterns below the Temple to receive the water used to wash away the blood. Alongside these cisterns were vaults where was kept the money received as Temple fees from pilgrims from all over the world. Johnson, Op. cit., pages 116–117.
71. G. A. Wells, The Jesus of the Early Christians, London: Pemberton Books, 1971, page 131.
72. Ibid., page 4.
73. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 426.
74. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 202.
75. Ibid., pages 147–148.
76. Ibid., page 151. See Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971, pages 80ff, for a discussion of the world that gave rise to non-canonical gospels.
77. Lane Fox, Op. cit., pages 123–124. See also: Bauer, Op. cit., pages 184ff, for a discussion of the early manuscripts of the gospels.
78. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 126.
79. Ibid., page 114. Bauer, Op. cit., pages 128–129, for the role of Marcion.
80. In 1966 the United Bible Societies issued a new Greek text of the Bible, for students and translators. According to the UBS, ‘There were two thousand places where alternative readings of any significance survived in good manuscripts.’ Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 156.
81. Frederiksen Op. cit., page 51.
82. Rowland, Op. cit., page 127.
83. Around AD 200 there were Christians who argued that Christ had been born on 3 November (this was based on a misunderstanding about Herod’s death), while others argued for the spring. Christmas has been celebrated on 25 December only since the fourth century and even then Christians in the eastern half of the empire preferred 6 January. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 36. See page 175 of this book.
84. Ge?a Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew, London: SCM Press, 1993, page 214.
85. Ibid.
86. Russell Shorto, Gospel Truth, New York: Riverhead/Puttnam, 1997, page 33.
87. Wells, Op. cit., page 12.
88. Ibid., page 13.
89. Ibid.
90. Vermes, Op. cit., page 217.
91. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 29.
92. Ibid., page 30.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., page 32. Bauer, Op. cit., page 45, quotes a report that Philo was in touch with Peter in Rome.
95. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 33. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1890/1994, page 358.
96. Vermes, Op. cit., pages 46–47.
97. Johnson, Op. cit., page 139.
98. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 21.
99. But Galilee is important in another way too. In the late 1990s, Dr Elhanen Reiner, of Tel Aviv University, came across some midrash–ancient commentaries on the Old Testament–dating back to 200 BC. These early documents contain several references to a Galilean figure of that date called Joshua who sounds very familiar. In Galilee, ‘Jesus’ was a common corruption of ‘Joshua’ and the narrative of Joshua has many parallels with that of Jesus, namely: (1) The first phase of Joshua’s leadership took place in Transjordan; Jesus’ first appearance in the Bible as an adult occurs with him bathing in the Jordan. (2) Joshua appointed twelve elders to apportion the land of Israel, just as Jesus appointed twelve disciples. (3) Joshua’s death ‘agitated the world’, an angel came down and there was an earthquake to mark the fact that God thought Joshua’s death a terrible thing, which few others did. Much the same happens with Jesus: the earth trembles and an angel descends. (4) The closest people to Joshua are called Joseph and Miriam (Mary). (5) Joshua’s death took place on 18 Iyyar, three days before Passover, the same day as the Crucifixion. (6) There is a Hebrew tradition, in an Aramaic book, that Jesus’ Crucifixion took place not in Jerusalem but in Tiberias–i.e., Galilee. (7) The stories of Joshua and Jesus both contain a Judah or Judas who plays a crucial, negative role. (8) At some point in the story, Joshua flees to Egypt, just as the family of the infant Jesus flees to Egypt. This is not the end of the parallels between the two traditions but even these few are enough to raise doubts about Jesus’ true identity. Personal interview, Tel Aviv, 26 November 1996.
100. Wells, Op. cit., page 93.
101. Ibid., page 94.
102. Ibid., page 95.
103. Ibid., page 99. See also: Brian Moynahan, The Faith, London: Aurum, 2002, pages 11–13.
104. Frederiksen, Op. cit., pages 120–121.
