Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah.
The first covenant had been established during the Exodus of Egypt, when God had given Moses his laws – and his promise to support the Jews. Christians hold that a ‘New Covenant’ was inaugurated with Christ’s offering of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, but by that time his coming had already transformed the relationship between God and man – and, more specifically, the Jews – in the scriptures. The New Testament differs radically from the Old Testament in tone. The word Gospel means ‘good news’, as the Christians keep reminding us, and there’s no disputing the new and unfamiliar emphasis we find in their pages on kindness, tolerance, forgiveness, informality and joy.
For a seriously ‘dark history’, then, we have to turn to the hypocrisies of Christ’s supposed followers in the later Church. But the New Testament does have its darker moments too.
The Holy Innocents
Although, as the province of Judaea, the land of the Jews was in New Testament times a territory of the Roman Empire, it enjoyed a degree of limited autonomy – and its own Jewish ruler, a client-king named Herod.
The Three Wise Men appear before King Herod, whose show of enthusiasm at the birth of a new ‘King of the Jews’ is promptly belied by the Massacre of the Innocents – the slaughter of all male babies – he orders.
In Jewish history Herod may have won the honorific ‘the Great’, for his rebuilding of the Temple, but he’s always been the king whom Christians loved to hate. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given his scriptural role: hearing from the three ‘wise men from the east’ (Matthew 2, 1) that a new ‘King of the Jews’ had been born, he had begged them to let him know if they should find him (2, 8). When, warned by an angel, they didn’t come back after finding the infant Jesus and went home by a different route, Herod (2, 16):
was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under.
The infant Jesus was not among them, Joseph having been urged by another angel in a dream to take his wife and child away to Egypt for their safety.
Simeon’s Sword
‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth,’ Christ was to tell his disciples many years later (Matthew 10, 34). ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ This threat may have been figurative, symbolic, but the all too real threat of violence was to dog his steps his whole life, from the Massacre of the Innocents to his own Passion and Crucifixion.
Meanwhile, safely back in his home country, Jesus was taken to the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. There he was hailed by a ‘just and devout’ man (Luke 2, 24), with the Holy Ghost upon him. Simeon had been waiting all his life for the coming of the Messiah, God’s ‘salvation’ (2, 30): ‘A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.’ Good news – but there was a warning too for the boy’s mother, Mary: ‘Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also’ (2, 35).
‘It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves’ (Matthew 21, 13) Christ drives the moneychangers and the traders from the Temple, as imagined by El Greco (c. 1600).
For the moment, though, all was well and the boy grew up in apparent peace until the moment came for him to embark on his ministry. Jesus was indeed ‘the light of the world’ (John 8, 12). The darkness in this part of his story is not easy to find, although we do at least see a flash of temper in Christ’s reaction to the commercialization of Jewish worship (Matthew 21, 12):
And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.
Joy Shall be in Heaven
Other than this, the story of Christ’s ministry is a more or less uninterrupted stream of light. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t encounter wrongdoers – there’s Zacchaeus the tax collector (Luke 9), for instance; the Woman Caught in Adultery (John 8, 3); the repentant woman who knelt weeping and washed Christ’s feet with tears (Luke 7, 36). This woman has traditionally been taken to be the Mary Magdalene we meet at Luke 8, 2, although the Gospel doesn’t actually state that this is so.
In every case, however, the sinner’s appearance only gives Christ the opportunity to show his forgiveness. ‘I say unto you,’ he tells those who have been listening to his parable of the Good Shepherd, who would not rest until he found the sheep that had strayed (Luke 15, 7): that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.
Thirty Pieces of Silver
Darkness doesn’t really enter the Gospel narrative until we read of Christ’s betrayal by one of his friends and apostles, Judas Iscariot. The motive for Judas’ treachery is never really explained – it’s been attributed to everything from pure monetary greed to a proto-Zionist’s disappointment at discovering that what he’d taken as a message of political liberation was really one of personal spiritual salvation.
DANCE OF DEATH
JESUS’ OLDER COUSIN John the Baptist had a special status as the man who prepared the way for Christ’s coming (Luke 1, 78), and signalled the start of his ministry by baptizing him in the River Jordan (hence his title). That he too fell foul of King Herod had nothing to do with his relationship to the Redeemer – nor, really, anything directly to do with Herod himself. Rather, an outspoken moralist, he had upset the queen, Herodias, with his condemnation of her marriage to the king. (She had previously been married to King Herod’s brother Philip.)
Herodias had wanted John the Baptist killed, but her husband had refused, fearing John as ‘a just man and an holy’ (Mark 6, 20). Herodias waited, then, looking for her opportunity. It came one evening after Herod had given an important banquet for a host of dignitaries (6, 22):
And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And … she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist.
Beautiful but sinister, this dancing daughter is never named in the Gospel story; the tradition that she was called Salome seems to have originated with the Jewish–Roman historian Josephus. Whatever her name, she is an obvious mythological heir to Delilah, who did for Samson, and a castrating counterbalance to that heroic seductress Judith. She makes a worthy addition to the long line of scriptural femmes fatales.
A dutiful daughter, if nothing else, Salome is rewarded for her dancing display by the reward her mother has asked for. The head of John the Baptist is lowered into a pewter plate, in Andrea Solari’s painting of 1510.
Belatedly repentant, Judas hurls his ill-gotten silver down at the feet of the priests and elders. Though happy enough to pay for Christ’s life, they were too fastidious to keep this blood money themselves.
Whatever his reasons, it seems that Judas went down to see the chief priests (Matthew 26, 14):
What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him.
That opportunity presented itself when, in the hours after celebrating his Last Supper with his apostles, Jesus was going through his ‘Agony in the Garden’ in Gethsemane. ‘Rise’, he chided his sleeping apostles (26, 46): ‘behold, he is at hand that doth betray me’ – even as Judas arrived with ‘a great multitude with swords and staves’. Judas now gave his new masters the ‘sign’ (26, 48) that would see him damned everlastingly in the annals of friendship: ‘Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.’ It was with a kiss, then, the mark of the dearest love, that he betrayed his friend, condemning him to torture and
death.
Too late, the next morning Judas ‘repented himself’ (27, 3). He took his thirty pieces of silver back to the priests and elders, saying ‘I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.’ Seeing them unmoved, he hurled down the money in the Temple, turned and ran out in an overwhelming fit of grief. And, Matthew calmly notes, ‘went and hanged himself’:
And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day. (27, 6)
‘I Find No Fault in Him’
Jesus was brought before the Sanhedrin, a priestly court, which mocked and bullied him before finding him guilty of setting himself up as the Son of God. And – in order to couch their condemnation in terms that might mean more to their Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate – of claiming that he was the ‘King of the Jews’. In John’s version of these events, Pilate questioned Christ, but was satisfied by his insistence that ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (18, 36): ‘I find no fault in him at all’ the Governor concluded (18, 38). The Jews, outraged, challenged him on his loyalty to the empire he was supposed to serve: ‘If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend’ (19, 12).
THE TYPE OF THE TRAITOR
JUDAS HAS GONE down in the mythic memory as the embodiment of the traitor: avaricious, opportunistic, selfish – without loyalty or honour. That he took as his sign to the authorities that universal symbol of friendship and affection, a kiss, only underlined the utter coldness of his cynicism.
Jesus’ Jewishness, that of every single one of his apostles, and indeed the obvious origins of their religion as a Jewish sect was an endless embarrassment to a Christian Europe that liked to condemn the entire Jewish people as the cruel killers of their saviour. Hence, perhaps, the vilification of one whose very name suggests some special degree of Jewishness, beyond that of his fellow disciples. And, for that matter, his portrayal in art with the flaming red hair and the long, hooked nose that personified the Jew to generations of Europeans – but which, by some Christian miracle, Jesus and the other disciples seem to have been ‘spared’.
At the same time, it should be remembered, the Gospel story – and Christian theology – would have been lost without him. Had he not sold out his Lord, where would we all have been? It seems to have been St Augustine who first formulated the idea of the felix culpa (the ‘happy fault’) – the sin that, wicked as it was, would open the way to good. Had not Eve talked Adam into eating the apple, Augustine reasoned, man might have been living in Eden to this day – but the higher paradise of heaven would not have been opened to him. By the same token, some would make the point that Judas’ treachery was an essential step in the process by which Christ came to give his life for humankind.
Some early scholars took this view to extreme conclusions, revering Judas for his role in our redemption. Towards the end of the second century, indeed, a Gospel of Judas was written. In this account, Judas wasn’t just a good apostle but unique in his appreciation of his master’s real message, a high-flown spiritualism that left the material world (and the sphere of human love and good works) behind.
Rat-faced, red-haired, stunted ... Judas is the traitor at the table. Joos van Cleve painted this Last Supper in the 1530s. It’s to be seen at the Church of Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.
Ecce homo! ‘Behold the Man!’: Pontius Pilate presents Jesus to the Jewish people in this painting by Antonio Ciseri (1871). Christ appears as a bleakly comic king, his bare back scourged; his head bleeding from a crown of thorns.
‘The Jews, outraged, challenged him on his loyalty to the empire he was supposed to serve’.
Pontius Pilate’s washing of his hands (Matthew 27, 24) – to represent that Jesus’ fate was no longer to be his problem, nor his responsibility – made him the type of the morally spineless functionary, an early example of that ‘banality of evil’ Hannah Arendt was to find in the Nazi Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. Not, however, before centuries of Christian bigots had justified their persecution of the Jews by the verse that follows (27, 25): ‘His blood be on us, and on our children.’
Death and Darkness
In the meantime, the blood was all on Christ himself, from his scourging (traditionally at a pillar – although Gospel accounts don’t mention this); from his mock crowning with a ring of thorns (Matthew 27, 9); from his nailing to the cross; and to the piercing of his side (John 19, 31). As for the darkness in this story, that descended literally in the moment of his death: there was a darkness over all the earth … the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst (Luke 23, 24).
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
CATHOLIC TRADITION HAS taken 14 moments from the story of Christ’s Passion and Death to make a series of scenes for prayerful contemplation. Most churches have images or carvings of these moments arranged about their interiors: pious Catholics proceed from one to another, praying at each as they make their way through what are called the ‘Stations of the Cross’.
1. Jesus is condemned to death.
2. Jesus carries the cross.
3. Jesus falls for the first time.
4. Jesus meets his mother Mary by the roadside.
5. A bystander, Simon of Cyrene, is recruited by the Romans to help Jesus to carry his cross. He seems to have had no choice, but has still come to symbolize the kindness of strangers.
6. Veronica, standing by the roadside and moved with pity for the pain the condemned man is suffering, gives him her veil so that he can wipe his face. He gives it back, and it is imprinted with his face.
7. Jesus falls for the second time.
8. Jesus turns to speak to the weeping women of Jerusalem, who have been following. He tells them (Luke 23, 27) not to weep for him but for themselves and for their children.
9. Jesus falls for the third time.
10. Jesus is stripped of his garments.
11. Jesus is nailed to the cross.
12. Jesus dies on the cross.
13. The ‘Deposition’. Jesus, dead, is taken down from the cross.
14. Jesus is laid in the tomb.
Not all these scenes have any scriptural basis: the three falls, for example, owe more to medieval symbolism than to anything in the Gospels. As for the St Veronica story, this too is the creation of later Christian tradition – used, perhaps, as a justification for the trade in relics.
Carrying his cross with the help of Simon of Cyrene, Jesus falls amidst his Via Dolorosa; whilst St Veronica prepares her veil to wipe his face. The medieval imagery gets a modern makeover in this stunning stained-glass window.
An eclipse, an earthquake? Very likely both – fitting mood-music for a deity’s death, even if he was (says the scripture) to rise again three days later.
From Pentecost to Persecution
In the days that followed, Christ’s disciples were first stunned, then sombre and then sorely afraid. The discovery that their Saviour was once more living was, to begin with, more of a shock than a reassurance. The comfort he brought them was not to last too long. Forty days after the Resurrection, he took his leave for good, ascending to heaven (Acts 1, 10). Now, it seemed, they were utterly alone.
For ten days they sat together, stunned and all but paralyzed, when (2, 2):
suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
‘And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire …’ Pentecost, and the Holy Ghost descends on Christ’s disciples where they have been hiding, demoralized and desperate, inspiring them with the courage of his Word.
Emboldened, the first Christians set out to
spread the Word. But the Holy Spirit was to offer them no protection – not in this world, at any rate. Those same religious authorities who had led the attack on Christ himself now sought to suppress his followers. St Stephen was to be the first to feel their wrath. A deacon of the Church, Stephen was hauled up before the Sanhedrin. Like his Lord before him, he made clear that his ambitions were not worldly. He was forthright, though, in his denunciation of their hypocrisy: ‘They were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth’ (7, 54):
Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, And cast him out of the city, and stoned him.
From Saul to Paul
Stephen’s death was doubly historic, for Christianity’s first martyrdom also marked the debut in the scriptural narrative of St Paul. For the moment he was little more than a bystander, although a staunchly anti-Christian one: Stephen’s killers ‘laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul’ (7, 58).
Christianity lays its first martyr to rest in the person of St Stephen, stoned to death around the year 36AD. The future St Paul, ironically, was among those present at the execution: he looked after the cloaks of those who were hurling stones.
Though he had a Roman name – Paulus, or Paul – as well, thanks to his father’s citizenship, the future disciple appears to have identified more strongly with his Jewish heritage. He was certainly ‘consenting unto’ St Stephen’s execution (8, 1). In fact, the experience galvanized him into action in defence of the faith in which he had been raised: he resolved to dedicate himself to Christianity’s eradication, ‘breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’ (9, 1). It was in pursuit of this objective that, famously, on the road to Damascus, he was felled by a dazzling light from heaven, ‘and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest me?’ The speaker then identified himself as Christ.
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