Pregnant, and on the brink of giving birth, she cried out in pain and another wonder appeared on high: this time it was ‘a great red dragon, having seven heads, and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads’ (12, 3). His tail, we’re told, ‘drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth (12, 5):
And the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
The man-child she bore was whisked away to heaven and to the throne of God (12, 5), while the woman ‘fled into the wilderness’:
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world (12, 9).
Who was this woman? The Virgin Mary, perhaps? That would explain the man-child. It’s been the view of the Catholic Church down many centuries that this is so. But Protestant commentators, for whom Our Lady never had quite the same significance, have tended to see her as allegorically representing ‘Mother Church’, her ‘man-child’ its faithful members.
Death and Judgment
In its final chapters, Revelation rushes towards a triumphant climax: the creation of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ (21, 1). ‘And I John’, says our narrator, naming himself in his sheer joy and pride:
saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
Here the blessed will live for ever: ‘there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away’ (21, 4). But the new scheme is binary by its very nature – the beauty of the new order lies in its symmetry, and this dictates that the saving of the virtuous must be balanced by the damnation of the rest. If ‘he that overcometh’ is to ‘inherit all things’ (21, 7), the divine logic of the Lord demands that:
the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
The Last Judgment, as described in Revelation 21 and depicted by Fra Angelico in a ‘winged’ altarpiece of c. 1450. Christ sits throned in majesty, whilst the souls of the saved are separated from the sinners in the scene below.
Christ holds up the Gospel of St John as though endorsing it in this icon from the Agiou Pavlou Monastery of Mount Athos, Chalkidiki, Greece. Even for believers, questions are to be faced as to how exactly such books should be read.
IX
THE BIBLE
GOSPEL TRUTH?
The Bible has a ‘dark history’ all of its own: patched together from a range of sources, its claims to authority were controversial from the start.
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‘Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.’ ROMANS 15, 4.
‘In the beginning was the Word …’ The famous opening of St John’s Gospel obviously echoes that of Genesis – as though setting scripture on the same sort of footing as the world. Quite a claim, yet not unjustified: the Word, as encountered in the Bible, has certainly been the foundation of faith for countless generations – for Jews, for Christians and to some extent for Muslims too. But, to put it bluntly, is the Good Book as good as its word?
The question is not simply whether the scriptural account is literally ‘true’: whether there’s the same accumulation of evidence for the historicity of Christ as there is for that of, say, George Washington or Winston Churchill. The answer to that question has to be a brief and brutal ‘No’ – although it’s not a question that most Christians would be inclined to ask. As for Old Testament figures such as Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, Jeremiah, Jonah or Ezekiel, only extreme fundamentalists see their stories as being ‘true’ in anything like a literal sense. But they are, of course, entitled to that belief.
Beyond the basic facts, there’s the more elusive question of how some sort of straightforward ‘truth’ is to be elicited from so vast (and often contradictory) a text. It’s not just that the Bible is susceptible to readings that may be wrong-headed or deliberately perverse (‘the devil can cite scripture for his purpose’, Shakespeare said). Written texts are by their very nature open to interpretation, and the bigger and more complex they are the more interpretations they make available.
Around a floridly illuminated ‘In Principio’ (for ‘In the Beginning ...’) St John’s Gospel gets under way in an explosive swirl of ornamentation in this early Latin Vulgate edition. Christ looks on from above while the Evangelist writes.
‘He Saith True’
‘And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe.’ While all the Gospels set forth their narratives as fact, this assertion – in St John’s account of Christ’s crucifixion (19, 35) – is the nearest we have to a declaration that what is described actually, literally happened and has been verified. The Old Testament, however stentorian its tone of authoritativeness may be, doesn’t trouble to make this sort of claim.
‘It’s not just that the Bible is susceptible to readings that may be wrong-headed or deliberately perverse’.
For what it’s worth, few scholars believe that St John did really witness the events he described – or even that there was any single man named ‘John’. Still less do they credit the claim that the author of this text was the Apostle John. Rather, they think, this powerful text was the work of a community of Christians, writing towards the end of the first century AD. While the other gospels set out the life and works of Christ then leave it up to their readers to draw the obvious conclusion of Jesus’ divinity and the greatness of his Church, John’s Gospel starts out with its Christian standpoint fully-formed.
His right hand raised in blessing, his face severe with rectitude, St John cuts an utterly credible figure in this stained-glass widow from St Gregory’s Church, Offchurch, Warwickshire. But might his air of authority be misleading?
But the other gospels were written only slightly earlier, it seems. Matthew’s seems to have been completed some time in the decade between 80 and 90 AD (although its authorship was then anonymous: the attribution ‘according to Matthew’ dates from the second century AD). Mark’s Gospel, by some way the shortest, was written in the 60s. It has taken second place in the traditional running because it was assumed to have been a summary of Matthew’s. Actually, in all probability it was the other way round: Matthew’s Gospel reworked and expanded Mark’s bare-bones account. (The ‘extra’ material deals with the doctrinal details of Jesus’ teachings on the one hand, and ways in which his words and actions fulfilled Old Testament prophecies on the other.) Luke’s Gospel, like the Acts of the Apostles (both of which are thought to have been written by the same person), is believed to date from some time around the year 80 AD.
PROGRESS TOWARDS THE PAST
IT GOES WITHOUT saying that the scripture has been read in different ways at different times. The temptation for us, in an age of self-conscious sophistication, is to see this as a gradual change from literal-minded credulity to a more metaphorical view of mythic narrative and spiritual ‘subtext’. This view, apparently so sceptical, is actually an aspect of our own modern ‘myth of progress’: the idea that the Bible should be read as factually ‘true’ is a surprisingly new one.
As long ago as medieval times, Catholic scholars saw the Old Testament as a mythic, mystic text whose deeper truths were to be drawn out by exegesis or interpretation. The Catholic way was, in any case, for the clergy to explain Christ’s teachings to largely uneducated, even illiterate, congregations. The Church’s authority was at stake, its Latin scripture the exclusive property of the hierarchy: attempts to translate it were at times to be savagely suppressed. At the same time, this elitist view encouraged what we might see
as a more ‘modern’ view of the Bible as a text to be interpreted, rather than as a straightforward record of actual events.
A more democratic reformed religion believed that the Bible belonged in the hands of believers: Martin Luther made his own translation between 1522 and 1534. Protestants read avidly: the Bible was their daily spiritual sustenance in a way it never had been previously, even for the most pious. Its stories stocked their minds; its imagery possessed their imagination; biblical characters became the companions of their lives.
The Enlightenment and the advent of modern science made religious belief more problematic, fostering confusion and uncertainty: many rejected religion out of hand. At the same time, though, in encouraging new standards in ‘truth’, a new sense of what it was to believe in something, these changes may, paradoxically, have produced a more literal-minded approach to the Bible among believers. Certainly, it was in the 1890s, when so many intellectuals were making the agonized journey to scientific atheism, that Christian fundamentalism was born.
Expression stern, Martin Luther faces down his Catholic critics. Standing beside a lectern, he’s shown with a finger pointing at the Bible, the basis of his authority – the only basis, he maintained, for any religious authority.
Contested Compositions
If there’s a certain amount of controversy over the authorship of the Gospels, this is nothing to the debate that’s raged over other, more marginal works. More marginal works which, however, have at one time or another had their pretensions to being part of sacred scripture.
With his focus on the humanity of Christ, St Matthew has a winged man – or an angel – as his symbol. Such a figure helps him write his Gospel in this painting from Venice’s Church of Santa Maria della Salute (by Antonio Triva da Reggio, 1626).
The apocryphal gospels are a loose collection of sources that purport to tell the story of Christ on the same sort of basis as the four officially-recognized or ‘canonical’ gospels – those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Derived from the Greek for ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’, the word apocryphal implies a dubiousness of status. (The story of George Washington and the cherry tree has generally been deemed ‘apocryphal’, for example.) Some apocrypha in fact follow the established accounts quite closely – they remain outside the canon mainly because their independent composition can’t be established. Others depart more radically from the mainstream sources, whether venturing into the sort of mystic depths the canonical gospels skirt around, or attempting to fill in the ‘gaps’ in the official version. Hence the attempts of many early writers to describe the childhood years of Jesus, before he embarked on his ministry.
SYNOPTIC OPTIONS
MATTHEW’S, MARK’S AND Luke’s accounts are known collectively as the ‘synoptic gospels’, leaving the Gospel of St John as the odd one out. The word ‘synoptic’ is Greek in origin: ‘syn’ means together (as in ‘synthesis’ or ‘synergy’) while ‘optic’ means ‘sight’ or ‘view’ (as in ‘optician’). Just as the ‘synopsis’ of a film or novel might give an at-a-glance overview of a big and complex narrative, the synoptic gospels present Christ’s life concisely and straightforwardly. But they’re also ‘synoptic’ in the sense that they share a perspective on their subject: all present much the same material in substantially the same way. John’s Gospel, while resembling the others in having at its heart a narration of the life, actions and teachings of Jesus Christ, seems to have drawn on different sources.
The New Testament apocrypha include certain subsets, such as the pseudepigrapha – so called because they were falsely attributed by their writers to earlier (and generally more famous) authors. The Gospel of Barnabas was one example – as was that of Judas: both date from the end of the second century AD or even later. Then there are the antilegomena – works whose authenticity, although accepted by some, is in dispute. For the most part these are excluded from the canon. Some remain, however – the most striking by some distance being the Book of Revelation, whose canonicity was questioned by many in the early Church (and by later reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin).
St Mark in stained glass by a German master craftsman of the nineteenth century. He stands amidst the splendour of his church. The sword betokens courage (his traditional symbol was the lion); the scroll the Gospel he gave us.
The Old Testament also has those deuterocanonical books that make it into the Catholic canon but not the Jewish – or, in most cases, the Protestant. Along with the Book of Judith, these include certain additions to the Books of Daniel and Esther as well as the Books of Tobit, Wisdom and 1 and 2 Maccabees.
From St Peter’s Church on the Channel Island of Sark, UK, comes this image of St Luke in a stained-glass window, a quill in his right hand as he writes his Gospel. Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
It was in 1946 that a Bedouin shepherd stumbled on a small cache of ancient texts, concealed in jars in a cave at Qumran in what is now the Palestinian Territory of the West Bank. Seven scrolls were found at first – the best part of a thousand were to follow as researchers investigated what turned out to be a network of caves, once apparently occupied by a community of Essenes. Members of a breakaway sect, the Essenes practised a particularly ascetic form of Judaism and lived in isolated communities in desert regions – like that around the shores of the Dead Sea.
AN UNCHRISTIAN CHRIST
ONE OF A series of apocryphal texts that tackle the ‘missing’ years of Jesus’ early upbringing, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas paints its subject in the most unpleasant colours. Its utterly implausible attribution to the Apostle Thomas qualifies it as pseudepigraphal: the dates wouldn’t fit his authorship, even if the doctrine did.
The boy Jesus, ‘Thomas’ asks us to believe, puts a curse on a boy who crosses him as a one-year old: his unfortunate enemy immediately falls down dead. Another boy, accidentally bumping into our future Saviour, is also cursed and pays for his clumsiness with his life. When neighbours in Nazareth complain about Jesus’ vengeful acts they are immediately blinded by his miraculous powers.
Written on parchment and papyrus in a range of ancient languages, from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek, these scrolls dated back as far as the fifth century BCE – and to as recently as the fourth century CE. While many were simply copies of known biblical texts, others may have been political and spiritual writings by the Essenes and other groups.
Yet another set of texts seem to have been scriptural writings – although not books accepted as canonical by Jewish (or Christian) Bible scholars. These include the Books of Enoch and Jubilees and several psalms.
Lost in Translations
The Old Testament presents itself, in the first instance, as a history of the Jews. Not surprisingly, then, it was written in Hebrew. The New Testament is a different case: while to begin with, under Peter’s leadership, Christianity remained closely associated with its Jewish origins, St Paul pushed for it to engage with – and to proselytize in – a wider world.
A fragment of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a veritable treasure-trove of scriptural and other writings (almost a thousand documents in all) stumbled upon by a Bedouin herdsman at Qumran, in the West Bank, in 1946.
The eastern Mediterranean and Middle East had since the time of Alexander the Great been under the sway of a Hellenic (or Greek) culture. This had remained true to a great extent even under Roman rule. When not directed to congregations in Greece itself (the Corinthians; the Thessalonians; the Philippians …), Paul’s Epistles are often directed to Greek-speaking groups in Asia Minor (the Ephesians; the Galatians …). Even the Epistle to the Romans was written in Greek rather than Latin.
A ‘codex’ is handwritten, but bound up like a modern printed book. Though incomplete when, in 1845, it was found at the Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery, in Sinai, the ‘Codex Sinaiticus’ gives the bulk of the Bible in fourth-century Greek.
It was natural, then, for the New Testament as a whole to have been written in Greek as we
ll – even when its authors were Judaean Jews. (The Old Testament too had for quite some time been readily accessible in Greek: the so-called Septuagint – named in Latin for the 70 scholars supposedly engaged in its translation – had been completed by the end of the second century BCE.)
THE MACCABEES
THE FIRST AND Second Books of the Maccabees describe the heroic resistance of the Jews to Hellenic (Greek) domination in the second century BCE. When Alexander the Great swept through the region in the fourth century BCE, Judaea went barely unnoticed among his conquests. History’s greatest military commander was to take possession of the Egypt of the Pharaohs as well as the vastness of Persia’s empire in the east. When he died in 323 BCE, his generals carved up his realms: Seleucus Nicator, having drawn an eastern section centring on Persia, started pushing westward at his rivals’ expense. The ‘Seleucid’ dynasty he founded was to hold sway here for generations.
By the second century BCE, however, Seleucid rule was starting to look shaky. Local rebellions were flaring up across the east. Judaea seemed peaceful enough until King Antiochus IV attempted to bring greater stability to his empire with an aggressive programme of Hellenization, which involved the stamping out of local cultures and religious practices.
Dark History of the Bible Page 17
