Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History)

by Cahill, Thomas

  And then God will send a king from the sun

  who will stop the entire earth from evil war …

  and he will not do all these things by his private plans

  but in obedience to the noble teachings of the great God.

  For many readers in the late first century B.C. and early first century A.D., verses like these brought Augustus to mind. The emperor had created peace without end, Pax Romana (which in fact would last a very long two hundred years). That he had done so by merciless policies would not have given ancient readers pause. After all, how else could you create peace save by unswerving military imposition?

  The historian Tacitus, describing the fall of Celtic Britain to Roman forces in A.D. 60, would put this apostrophe to the Romans on the lips of a conquered Celt:

  Harriers of the world, now that the earth [the continent of Eurasia] fails their all-devastating hands they probe even the sea [the Atlantic island of Britain]; if their enemy has wealth, they have greed; if he is poor, they are ambitious; East and West have glutted them; alone of mankind they behold with the same passion of concupiscence waste alike and want. To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname Empire; they make a desolation and call it peace. Children and kin are by the law of nature each man’s dearest possessions: they are swept away from us by conscription to be slaves in other lands; our wives and sisters, even when they escape a soldier’s lust, are debauched by self-styled friends and guests: our goods and chattels go for tribute, our lands and harvests in requisitions of grain; life and limb themselves are used up in leveling marsh and forest to the accompaniment of gibes and blows. Slaves born to slavery are sold once for all and are fed by their masters free of charge; but Britain pays a daily price for her own enslavement, and feeds the slavers.

  Seldom has an imperialist seen so clearly the cost of imperialism on “lesser breeds” as the mordant Tacitus does here. But even Tacitus, who aimed to write sine ira et studio (“without passion or partisanship”), thought conquest inevitable.

  On his victorious return to Rome from his provinces of Spain and Gaul, Augustus personally dedicated the exquisite Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, on the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, the Roman god of war. Peace grew out of war: that was how things were. That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who “make a desolation and call it peace”) at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn’t Philip of Macedon’s first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn’t Alexander’s last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,10 and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying.

  If the emperor had many apologists, none did him greater honor than Virgil, who wrote the stirring national epic, the Aeneid, in Augustus’s honor, connecting the emperor (as did the reliefs that decorated the Ara Pacis) to Aeneas, Rome’s legendary founding hero. In the famous “Fourth Eclogue,” Virgil assumes the prophetic mantle and, giving the Sibylline prophecies a wildly optimistic interpretation, uses the old technique of pretending to anticipate what had already come to pass:

  Now comes the time sung by Cumae’s Sibyl,

  when the wheel of the ages starts afresh.

  Now is the Virgin herself made known

  and the reign of Saturn on earth;

  Now is a child engendered by heaven.

  Smile, chaste Lucina, at the birth of this boy

  who will put an end to our wretched age,

  from whom golden people shall spring.

  Now does your own Apollo reign!

  If Jews might be pardoned for thinking that Virgil was writing of their Messiah, or Christians their Christ (as was imagined to be the case throughout the Middle Ages), the educated pagan reader took Virgil’s parve puer, his “baby boy,” to be the young Augustus, who would go on to bring about a peace so extensive that it would affect even nature:

  Without being called, the goats shall return,

  their udders swollen with milk.

  The herds shall have no fear of lions.…

  The serpent shall be no more,

  and the poison-plant shall perish,

  but Assyrian spice shall spring up everywhere.

  Despite the remarkable affinity of these lines with Isaiah’s prophecy of the Peaceable Kingdom, Virgil knew nothing of Isaiah or any of the Jewish holy books. How, then, explain the striking similarity of images—the response of nature, the favor of God that rests upon the child, the “gift of divine life” (ille deum vitam accipiet), even the seeming allusion to a virgin birth? One may chalk it all up to coincidence. Or one may say that, beneath the surface differences of each culture—whether of cynical Romans, theoretical Greeks, fantasizing Jews, cyclical Orientals, or post-Christian Occidentals—there beats in human hearts a hope beyond all hoping, the hope of the hopeless, the hope of those who would disclaim any such longing, the hope of those who like the two tramps in Waiting for Godot seem to be waiting in vain, a hope—not for an emperor, not for an Exalted One—but for a Just One.

  1 Demosthenes was for the Greeks what Cicero would be for the Romans, the consummate rhetorician. The elder contemporary of Alexander, he had vainly warned the Athenians of the growing power of Philip’s Macedon. He considered Philip’s son a contemptible parvenu and always referred to him as “the boy.” His supple orations, modulated expressions of opinion on political affairs no longer of consequence to us, are virtually unreadable today.

  2 In “Under Ben Bulben,” W. B. Yeats, who beat his own son, imagines that “Aristotle played the taws / Upon the bottom of a king of kings,” but I doubt that even Aristotle was permitted much whacking of Alexander’s precious little bottom.

  3 The Essenes may have risen out of an earlier movement, the Hasidim (or Saints), who were scrupulous about the Law, had already removed themselves to caves beyond the city in the time of Judas Maccabeus, and temporarily allied themselves with him in the early stages of the Maccabean-Hasmonean movement. Some scholars are of the opinion that the Hasidim were also forerunners of the Pharisees and even of the Sadducees. Such speculation lies outside our story. The Hasidim of our day, who first appeared in southeastern Poland in the mid-eighteenth century as followers of the Baal Shem Tov, have no direct connection, apart from their name, to the ancient Hasidim.

  4 This rather chilling woman was hailed not only by unyielding Jews of late antiquity but by early Christians who took her as a model of martyrdom and built churches in memory of her and her sons. The legend of this mother and her sons is, in fact, our first recorded “martyrology” (or inspiring record of religious witness in the face of certain torture and death at the hands of a cruel public official) and provided the pattern that all subsequent examples of the genre would follow. The Greek word martyr means “witness.”

  5 This passage has many translations, the most famous being “I know that my Redeemer liveth …” in the King James Version. But the Hebrew goel is not “redeemer” but a technical legal term meaning something like “public defender” or “ombudsman”—though with a more aggressive nuance. However one translates it, it appears to refer to God.

  6 Tribunes were elected by the people to protect their interests. The office was one of several of the Roman Republic designed to achieve a careful balance of powers among competing forces and to keep political chaos at bay. The two consuls, elected to serve but one year’s term, were the executive pinnacle of government. There were two of them in order that they might keep each other honest, and they served but one year so that they could not amass
undue power. The office of senator was either hereditary or bestowed for exceptional distinction (as in the British House of Lords). But all the rhetoric about “Republican” Rome hid the truth that Rome was an oligarchy, arranged to protect the interests of its wealthiest families. Once the empire was established, supposedly as a temporary measure during an emergency, there was no longer any need to uphold the fiction of the Republic (ResPublica, “the Common Good”), save as vestigial decoration.

  7 The Holy Land, or Canaan, as it is called in Genesis, was gradually colonized by the Israelites under Joshua (and later), though it was never without other colonizers, such as the Philistines. Under Kings Saul and David, the federation of Israelite tribes united as the Kingdom of Israel. Under David’s knuckleheaded grandson Rehoboam, the kingdom was sundered in two: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Israel was subsequently destroyed as a separate political entity by the Assyrians, its principal families scattered and replaced by Aramaic-speaking colonizers, who intermarried with the remaining peasant stock to become the Samaritans of Samaria. The people of Judah, now the Jews, though they suffered the Babylonian Captivity, were allowed to return to their devastated country by the Edict of (the Persian king) Cyrus in 538 B.C. Many remained abroad, creating the Jewish diaspora, but some returned. From this time on, the land was designated by the Greeks as “Palestine” (from “Philistine”). The reduced Jewish homeland of Judah would be called “Judea” by the Romans, who would sometimes use this name to refer to all of Palestine.

  8 It is one of the ironies of calendrical history that Jesus was born between 6 and 4 B.C. (before Christ). Dionysius Exiguus, or Denis the Short, the sixth-century monk who created our dating system of B.C. and A.D. (anno Domini, “in the year of the Lord”) on the basis of earlier rabbinical models, made a miscalculation.

  9 In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was read throughout the ancient Jewish diaspora, the word parthenos, or “virgin,” is used. The Hebrew original has simply alma, or “young (unmarried) girl,” though, given the rigid sexual conventions of the age, alma pretty much shades into “virgin.” Hebrew does have a separate word, betula, for “virgin” in the technical sense.

  10 Of this colossus only a finger remains, still to be seen in the Forum.

  II

  The Last of the Prophets

  The Jesus the Apostles Knew

  THE TIME HAS COME: the Kingdom of God draws near. Open your hearts and believe the Good News.”

  These are the first words that Jesus speaks in Mark’s Gospel, which—at least in the form that we now have it—is the most primitive of the four canonical accounts of Jesus’s life. There is scarcely a word of this proclamation that does not call for explanation, though in Jesus’s day each word would have carried a clear, if surprising, meaning to the Galilean peasants who heard it. The “Time” that has come is the time of the fulfillment of Jewish dreams, the time when God will show his special love for the Jews by breaking the bonds of their servitude and exalting them among the nations. It is the time they have been waiting for—waiting so long that they had almost ceased to believe that it could ever come to pass, so long after the destruction of ten of the Twelve Tribes, so long after the disaster of the Babylonian Captivity, which had been followed only by further oppression, so long after the drying up of prophetic inspiration had left them without direction. The “Kingdom” that they will participate in will be God’s Kingdom, as he promised.

  They are invited to shake off their worldly preoccupations and “open [their] hearts.” The Greek imperative is metanoeite, which means literally “change your minds.” It is usually translated as “repent” or “convert,” both more harsh than the Greek. The word certainly refers to a spiritual turnaround, but the change that is looked for here is an openness to something new and unheard of. This “something new” is to euaggelion, not simply “good news” but “the good news,” the best news ever. Our word “go’spel,” an Anglo-Saxon elision of “good spell” (meaning “good word” or “good news”) is the Old English translation of the Greek euaggelion.1

  Jesus’s idea of the Time-That-Has-Come has no suggestion of catastrophe, no smell of fire and brimstone in it. Though present in his announcement is a challenge, his words caress the listener with welcome possibility. He does not threaten or condemn; he opens his arms to invite and encourage. The gentleness of this prophet is as unexpected as his message.

  This does not mean that Jesus did not know the apocalyptic tradition. His precursor, John the Baptizer, stood squarely within that tradition, which was, in any case, in the air that Jesus breathed. And Jesus, by beginning with the normally dreadful words “the Time has come,” is making direct reference to this tradition of expectation. But the surprise is that this Time-That-Has-Come is to be Apocalypse without Armageddon.2 Jesus takes the tradition and gives it a twist, develops it beyond what might have been thought possible, and transforms it into something new. It is a method we will see him use repeatedly throughout his short life.

  There is perhaps no more important word in this brief formula, remembered from Jesus’s early preaching, than the word believe. No news is good news, as we know even today and as the ancients knew in their bones. But Jesus’s audience is invited to allow themselves to experience an inner change, so that they may put their trust in this Good News—so that they may believe, despite the ingrained presuppositions of the ancient world, that news can be good.

  What made this man think that he could get away with this—this patent nonsense that went so directly against the grain of ancient society? For an answer we may turn to the first figure to present himself in Mark’s Gospel—not Jesus but an even more marginal character, the wild and (literally) woolly John the Baptizer, who inhabited the deserts south of Jerusalem, lived off locusts and wild honey, clothed his loins in camel skin, and could be counted on to put the fear of God in people. He, too, told them that “the Time has come” and that they’d better get themselves ready. He was a man removed from ordinary human commerce, a desert crazy quite outside the life of society, one probably associated with the exceptional community of Essenes, but people sought him out and submitted to his baptism3 because his predictions of the coming re-tribution both thrilled and terrified them. Having been cleansed with water while confessing their sins, they thought themselves ready for the coming Time. Mark connects the Baptizer to the prophecy of Deutero-Isaiah: this John is “the voice of [one] that crieth in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord,’ ” who “make[s] straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

  Then Jesus arrives on the scene and allows John to immerse him in the Jordan. As he breaks the surface of the water, he sees the heavens torn open and God’s Spirit “like a dove, descending on him”; and he hears a voice, saying: “You are my Son, the Beloved One. You delight me.” Mark fails to tell us if anyone but Jesus saw and heard these marvels. But there can be no question that this moment is central to Jesus’s life. Like all the prophets before him, he has received the Spirit, lamentably absent during the preceding prophet-less centuries. Henceforth, the words that come from his mouth, like those of Isaiah and all of Jesus’s prophetic predecessors, will be the words of God himself.

  This is a difficult scene for modern readers to take seriously. Despite the fact that many of us secretly harbor uncanny experiences that have helped us lead our lives, the tenor of our age encourages us to brush these off as “coincidences,” and we don’t talk about such things lest everyone think we’re nuts. Instead, we—publicly, at least—relegate all such experiences to the dustbin of pathology and speak dismissively of narcissism, Messiah complexes, and delusions of grandeur. The trouble with this response is that it fails to explain the rest of Jesus’s life, including what happens next.

  Returning to his native Galilee, he calls out to two fishermen (whom we may presume he knew previously) to “follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” These two, Simon and his brother Andrew, surnamed bar-Jonah,4 two r
ough, down-to-earth laborers unlikely to follow a madman, “immediately dropped the nets [that they had been casting into the Lake of Galilee] and followed him.” Even if these two had been unusually suggestible, it’s unlikely that any self-enclosed whacko could have pulled off this trick a second time—but this is what Jesus proceeds to do. “And when he had gone a bit further,” Mark tells us, “he noticed James son of Zebedee and his brother John, sitting in their boat and mending their nets. Straightaway, he called them to him; and they left old Zebedee behind in the boat, along with the hired men, and they too followed him.” A single loner might have heeded this call, but surely not two separate sets of brothers, the second two overseeing employees at their father’s behest.

  The next scene goes to the heart of the extraordinary impression that Jesus’s presence made on his contemporaries and relieves us of any lingering suspicions about his sanity. Jesus and his four fishermen travel on to Capernaum, where the bar-Jonah brothers live. On the Sabbath, Jesus enters the local synagogue, reads aloud a passage from the scroll of scriptures, and then begins “to teach. And everyone was amazed at his teaching, because he taught them with authority, unlike the scribes.” We all know what this means, for we have all encountered people who instill confidence in others by the air of authority that issues from them. The other teachers (scribes or rabbis, to use the usual appellations) could not compare.