Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 48 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In Luke’s ekklesia, Jews and gentiles found that by reaching out to the ‘other’, they experienced the Shekhinah, which, increasingly, they identified with their christos. A number of churches in Asia Minor were developing a different understanding of Jesus, represented by the gospel and three epistles attributed to John and the eschatological book of Revelation. All these ‘Joannine’ texts saw Jesus as the incarnate Logos who had descended to earth as God’s ultimate revelation. 91 Jesus was the Lamb of God, a sacrificial victim who took away the sins of the world, like the lambs ritually slaughtered in the temple at Passover. 92 They believed that their most important duty was to love one another, 93 but they did not reach out to the stranger. This community felt beleaguered and clung together in opposition to ‘the world’. 94 The whole of existence seemed polarized into conflicting opposites: light against darkness, world against spirit, life against death, and good against evil. The churches had recently suffered a painful schism: some of their members had found their teachings ‘intolerable’ and ‘stopped going with Jesus’. 95 The faithful saw these apostates as ‘antichrists’, filled with murderous hatred of the messiah. 96 The members of this Christian sect were convinced that they alone were right and that the whole world was against them. 97 John’s gospel in particular was addressing an ‘in group’, which had a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. Constantly Jesus had to tell ‘the Jews’ that they would look for him and fail to find him: ‘where I am you cannot come’. 98 His audience was continually baffled but because Jesus was God’s ultimate revelation to the world, this lack of acceptance was a judgement: those who rejected him were the children of the devil and would remain in darkness. For John, Judaism was well and truly over. He systematically depicted Jesus replacing every single one of God’s major revelations to Israel. Henceforth the risen Logos would be the place where Jews would encounter the divine presence: Jesus the Logos would take over the function of the ruined temple, and become the place where Jews would encounter the divine presence. 99 When he walked out of the temple, the Shekhinah withdrew with him. 100 When he celebrated the festival of Sukkoth, during which water was ceremonially poured over the altar and the giant torches of the temple were set alight, Jesus – like Wisdom – cried aloud that he was the living water and the light of the world. 101 On the feast of Unleavened Bread, he claimed that he was the ‘bread of life’. Not only was he greater than Moses 102 and Abraham, but he embodied the divine presence: he had the temerity to pronounce the forbidden name of God: ‘before Abraham ever was, I Am [Ani Waho]’.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  50 For Bryan, evolution was surrounded by a nimbus of evil, which symbolized the ruthless potential of modernity. Bryan’s conclusions were naive and incorrect but people were ready to listen to him. The war had ended the honeymoon period with science and they wanted it kept within due bounds. Those who espoused plain-speaking Baconian religion found it in Bryan, who singlehandedly pushed the topic of evolution to the top of the fundamentalist agenda, where it has remained. But it might never have replaced the Higher Criticism had it not been for a dramatic development in Tennessee. The southern states had hitherto taken little part in the fundamentalist movement but they were worried about the teaching of evolution. Bills were introduced into the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas to ban the teaching of Darwinian theory. The anti-evolutionary laws in Tennessee were particularly strict and John Scopes, a young teacher in the small town of Dayton, decided to strike a blow for freedom of speech and confessed that he had broken the law when he had taken a biology class in place of his principal. In July 1925 he was brought to trial. The new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow. Bryan agreed to support the law. Immediately the trial became a contest between the Bible and science. Bryan was a disaster on the stand and Darrow emerged from the trial as the champion of rational thought. The press gleefully denounced the fundamentalists as hopeless anachronisms, who could take no part in the modern world. This had an effect that is instructive to us today. When fundamentalist movements are attacked they usually become more extreme. Before Dayton, the conservatives were wary of evolution, but very few had espoused ‘creation science’, which maintained that the first chapter of Genesis was factually true in every detail. After Scopes, however, they became more vehemently literal in their interpretation of scripture, and creation science became the flagship of their movement. Before Scopes, fundamentalists had been willing to work for social reform with people on the left; after Scopes, they swung to the far right of the political spectrum, where they have remained. After the Holocaust, orthodox Jews felt impelled to rebuild the Hasidic courts and misnagdic yeshivoth in the new Jewish state of Israel and the United States as an act of piety to the six million. 51 Torah study was now a lifelong, full-time pursuit. Men would continue at the yeshivah after they married and, supported financially by their wives, had minimal contact with the outside world. 52 These ultra-orthodox Jews, known as the Haredim (the ‘trembling ones’), 53 observed the commandments more rigorously than ever before, 54 finding new ways of being punctilious about diet and purification. 55 Before the Holocaust, excessive stringency had been discouraged as divisive.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  This changed after Palestine was conquered by the Roman general Pompey in 63 BCE and became a province of the Roman empire. In some ways, Roman rule was beneficial. King Herod, the protégé of Rome who reigned in Jerusalem from 37 to 4 BCE, rebuilt the temple on a magnificent scale and pilgrims flocked there to celebrate the festivals. But the Romans were unpopular and some of the prefects, notably Pontius Pilate (26–36 CE), went out of their way to insult Jewish sensibilities. A number of prophets tried to mobilize the population to revolt.50 A certain Theudas led four hundred men into the desert, promising that God would liberate them there. A prophet known as the ‘Egyptian’ persuaded thousands of people to congregate on the Mount of Olives in order to storm the Roman fortress that was positioned provocatively beside the temple. Most of these uprisings were savagely suppressed and on one occasion the Romans crucified as many as two thousand rebels outside Jerusalem. During the 20s CE, John the Baptizer, an ascetic prophet who may have belonged to the Essene movement, drew large crowds to the Judaean desert where he preached that the ‘kingdom of heaven’ was at hand.51 There would be a great judgement for which Jews must prepare by confessing their sins, immersing themselves in the river Jordan, and vowing to live a blameless, honest life.52 Even though John does not seem to have preached against Roman rule, he was executed by the authorities. John seems to have been related in some way to Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean healer and exorcist, who announced the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God at about the same time.53 Anti-Roman feeling was especially rife during the great national festivals, and Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate in about 30 CE when he went to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover there. But that did not end the Jesus movement. Some of his disciples were convinced that he had risen from the tomb; they claimed that they had seen him in visions and that his personal resurrection heralded the last days, when the righteous dead would rise from their graves. Jesus would soon return in glory to inaugurate the kingdom. Their leader in Jerusalem was Jesus’s brother James, who was known as the Tzaddik, the ‘Righteous One’ and had good relations with both the Pharisees and the Essenes. But the movement also attracted Greek-speaking Jews in the diaspora and, most surprisingly, a significant number of ‘God-fearers’, non-Jews who were honorary members of the synagogues.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  When the women went to anoint the body, they found that the tomb was empty. Even though an angel told them that Jesus had risen, ‘the women came out and ran away from the tomb because they were frightened out of their wits; and they said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid’. 73 Mark’s story ended here, epitomizing the sense of fearful suspension that Christians experienced at this time. Yet Mark’s terse, brutal tale was ‘Good News’, because the kingdom had ‘already arrived’. 74 But by the time Matthew was writing in the late 80s, these hopes were beginning to fade. Nothing had changed: how could the kingdom have come? Matthew replied that it was coming unobtrusively, and was working silently in the world like yeast in a batch of dough. 75 His community was frightened and angry. They were accused by their fellow Jews of abandoning the Torah and the prophets; 76 they had been flogged in the synagogues, dragged before tribunals of elders, 77 and expected to be tortured and killed before the End. 78 Matthew was, therefore, especially anxious to show that Christianity was not only in harmony with Jewish tradition but was its culmination. Almost every single event in Jesus’s life had happened ‘to fulfil the scriptures’. Like Ishmael, Samson and Isaac, his birth was announced by an angel. 79 His forty days of temptation in the desert paralleled the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness; Isaiah had foretold his miracles. 80 And – most importantly – Jesus was a great Torah teacher. He proclaimed the new law of the messianic age from a mountaintop 81 – like Moses – and insisted that he had come not to abolish but to complete the Law and the prophets. 82 Jews must now observe the Torah more stringently than ever before. It was no longer sufficient for Jews to refrain from murder; they must not even get angry. Not only was adultery forbidden; a man could not even look at a woman lustfully. 83 The old law of retaliation – eye for eye, tooth for tooth – was superseded: Jews must now turn the other cheek and love their enemies. 84 Like Hosea, Jesus argued that compassion was more important than ritual observance. 85 Like Hillel, he preached the Golden Rule. 86 Jesus was greater than Solomon, Jonah and the temple. 87 The Pharisees of Matthew’s day claimed that Torah study would introduce Jews to the divine presence ( Shekhinah ) that they had formerly encountered in the temple: ‘If two sit together and words of Torah are between them, the Shekhinah rests between them.’ 88 But Jesus promised: ‘where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them.’

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In The Descent of Man, a later work, he suggested that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same proto-ape as the gorilla and chimpanzee. The Origin was a sober, careful exposition of a scientific theory that attracted a large popular audience: 1,400 copies were sold on the day of publication. Darwin did not intend to attack religion and at first the religious response was muted. There was far greater outcry when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews (1861), which made the Higher Criticism accessible to the general reader. 25 The public were now informed that Moses had not written the Pentateuch nor David the Psalms. Biblical miracles were simply literary tropes and should not be understood literally, and most of the events described in the Bible were clearly not historical. The authors of Essays and Reviews argued that the Bible should not be given special treatment but must be approached with the same critical rigour as any other ancient text. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Higher Criticism rather than Darwinism was the main bone of contention between liberal and conservative Christians. Liberals believed that in the long term the critical method would lead to a deeper understanding of the Bible. But for conservatives, the Higher Criticism symbolized everything that was wrong with the post-Enlightenment world that was sweeping old certainties away. 26 In 1888, the British novelist Mrs Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, the story of a young clergyman whose faith was destroyed by the Higher Criticism. It became a bestseller, indicating that many people sympathized with Robert’s dilemma. As his wife said: ‘If the Gospels are not true as fact, as history, I cannot see that they are true at all, or of any value.’ 27 It is a sentiment that many would share today. The rational bias of the modern world made it difficult – if not impossible – for an increasing number of Western Christians to appreciate the role and value of mythology. There was, therefore, a growing sense that the truths of religion must be factual and a deep fear that the Higher Criticism would leave a dangerous void. Discount one miracle and consistency demanded that you reject them all. If Jonah did not spend three days in the whale’s belly, asked a Lutheran pastor, did Jesus really rise from the tomb? 28 Clergymen blamed the Higher Criticism for widespread drunkenness, infidelity, and the rising crime and divorce rates. 29 In 1886, the American revivalist preacher Dwight Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the Higher Criticism.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Darwin did not intend to attack religion and at first the religious response was muted. There was far greater outcry when seven Anglican clergymen published Essays and Reviews (1861), which made the Higher Criticism accessible to the general reader.25 The public were now informed that Moses had not written the Pentateuch nor David the Psalms. Biblical miracles were simply literary tropes and should not be understood literally, and most of the events described in the Bible were clearly not historical. The authors of Essays and Reviews argued that the Bible should not be given special treatment but must be approached with the same critical rigour as any other ancient text. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Higher Criticism rather than Darwinism was the main bone of contention between liberal and conservative Christians. Liberals believed that in the long term the critical method would lead to a deeper understanding of the Bible. But for conservatives, the Higher Criticism symbolized everything that was wrong with the post-Enlightenment world that was sweeping old certainties away.26 In 1888, the British novelist Mrs Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, the story of a young clergyman whose faith was destroyed by the Higher Criticism. It became a bestseller, indicating that many people sympathized with Robert’s dilemma. As his wife said: ‘If the Gospels are not true as fact, as history, I cannot see that they are true at all, or of any value.’27 It is a sentiment that many would share today. The rational bias of the modern world made it difficult – if not impossible – for an increasing number of Western Christians to appreciate the role and value of mythology. There was, therefore, a growing sense that the truths of religion must be factual and a deep fear that the Higher Criticism would leave a dangerous void. Discount one miracle and consistency demanded that you reject them all. If Jonah did not spend three days in the whale’s belly, asked a Lutheran pastor, did Jesus really rise from the tomb?28 Clergymen blamed the Higher Criticism for widespread drunkenness, infidelity, and the rising crime and divorce rates.29 In 1886, the American revivalist preacher Dwight Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the Higher Criticism. His aim was to create a cadre of true believers to fight the false ideas that, he was convinced, had brought the nation to the brink of destruction. The Bible Institute would become a crucial fundamentalist phenomenon, representing a safe and sacred haven in a Godless world.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The term ‘bastion’ is appropriate, because this quest for a wholly rationalistic interpretation of the Bible seemed chronically defensive. ‘Religion has to fight for its life against the large class of scientific men,’ wrote Charles Hodge (1797–1878), Princeton professor of theology. 31 In 1871, Hodge published the first volume of his Systematic Theology. The title alone revealed its Baconian bias. The theologian, Hodge argued, was not to look for a meaning beyond the words of scripture but should simply arrange the teachings of the Bible into a system of general truths – a project that would involve a good deal of misplaced effort, because this type of system was entirely alien to the Bible. In 1881, Archibald A. Hodge, Charles’s son, published a defence of the literal truth of the Bible with his younger colleague Benjamin Warfield. It became a classic: ‘The scriptures not only contain but are the Word of God, and hence all their elements and all their affirmations are absolutely errorless and binding on the faith and obedience of men.’ Every biblical statement – on any subject – was absolute ‘truth to the facts’. 32 The nature of faith was changing. It was now no longer ‘trust’ but intellectual submission to a set of beliefs. But for Hodge and Warfield, this required no suspension of disbelief because Christianity was entirely rational. ‘It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way,’ Warfield argued in a later article, ‘And it is solely by reasoning that it will put its enemies under its feet.’ 33 This was an entirely new departure. In the past, some interpreters had favoured the study of the literal sense of the Bible but they had never believed that every single word of scripture was factually true. Many had admitted that, if we confined our attention to the letter, the Bible was an impossible text. The belief in biblical inerrancy, pioneered by Warfield and Hodge, would, however, become crucial to Christian fundamentalism and would involve considerable denial. Hodge and Warfield were responding to the challenge of modernity but in their desperation were distorting the scriptural tradition they were trying to defend. The same was true of the new apocalyptic vision that gripped conservative American Protestants in the late nineteenth century. This was the creation of an Englishman, John Nelson Darby (1800–82), who found few followers in Britain but toured the United States to great acclaim between 1859 and 1877. 34 He was convinced, on the basis of a literal reading of Revelation, that God would shortly bring this era of history to an end in an unprecedentedly terrible disaster. Antichrist, the fake redeemer whose coming before the end had been foretold by St Paul, 35 would initially be welcomed and would deceive the unwary.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  His aim was to create a cadre of true believers to fight the false ideas that, he was convinced, had brought the nation to the brink of destruction. The Bible Institute would become a crucial fundamentalist phenomenon, representing a safe and sacred haven in a Godless world. Conservatives who felt outnumbered by the liberals in the denominations started to band together. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Bible Conference, where conservatives could read scripture in a literal, no-nonsense manner and purge their minds of the Higher Criticism, became increasingly popular in the United States. There was a widespread hunger for certainty. People now expected something entirely new from the Bible – something it had never pretended to offer hitherto. In his book, tellingly entitled Many Infallible Proofs (1895), the American Protestant Arthur Pierson wanted the Bible discussed ‘in a truly impartial and scientific spirit’: I like Biblical theology that . . . does not begin with an hypothesis and then wraps the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged. 30 At a time when so many traditional beliefs were being eroded, this was an understandable desire but the myths of the Bible could not possibly provide the scientific certainty that Pierson expected. The Presbyterian seminary at Princeton, New Jersey, became the bastion of this ‘scientific’ Protestantism. The term ‘bastion’ is appropriate, because this quest for a wholly rationalistic interpretation of the Bible seemed chronically defensive. ‘Religion has to fight for its life against the large class of scientific men,’ wrote Charles Hodge (1797–1878), Princeton professor of theology. 31 In 1871, Hodge published the first volume of his Systematic Theology. The title alone revealed its Baconian bias. The theologian, Hodge argued, was not to look for a meaning beyond the words of scripture but should simply arrange the teachings of the Bible into a system of general truths – a project that would involve a good deal of misplaced effort, because this type of system was entirely alien to the Bible. In 1881, Archibald A. Hodge, Charles’s son, published a defence of the literal truth of the Bible with his younger colleague Benjamin Warfield. It became a classic: ‘The scriptures not only contain but are the Word of God, and hence all their elements and all their affirmations are absolutely errorless and binding on the faith and obedience of men.’

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  CHAPTER 1 TorahIn 597 BCE, the tiny state of Judah in the highlands of Canaan broke its vassalage treaty with Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of the powerful Babylonian empire. It was a catastrophic mistake. Three months later, the Babylonian army besieged Jerusalem, Judah’s capital. The young king surrendered immediately and was deported to Babylonia, together with some ten thousand of the citizens who made the state viable: priests, military leaders, craftsmen and metal workers. As they left Jerusalem, the exiles would have taken one last look at the temple built on Mount Zion by King Solomon (c.970–930 BCE), the centre of their national and spiritual life, sadly aware that in all likelihood they would never see it again. Their fears were realized: in 586, after yet another rebellion in Judah, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and burned Solomon’s temple to the ground. The exiles were not ill-treated in Babylon. The king was comfortably housed with his entourage in the southern citadel, and the rest lived together in new settlements by the canals and were allowed to manage their domestic affairs. But they had lost their country, their political independence, and their religion. They belonged to the people of Israel and believed that their god Yahweh had promised that if they worshipped him exclusively, they would live in their land forever. The Jerusalem temple, where Yahweh had dwelt among his people, was essential to his cult. Yet here they were in an alien land, cast out of Yahweh’s presence. This must be a divine punishment. Time and again, the Israelites had failed to keep their covenant agreement with Yahweh and had succumbed to the lure of other deities. Some of the exiles assumed that, as the leaders of Israel, it was up to them to rectify the situation, but how could they serve Yahweh without the temple that was their only means of making contact with their god? Five years after his arrival in Babylon, standing beside the Chebar canal, a young priest called Ezekiel had a terrifying vision. It was impossible to see anything clearly because nothing in this stormy maelstrom of fire and tumultuous sound conformed to ordinary human categories, but Ezekiel knew that he was in the presence of the kavod, the ‘glory’ of Yahweh, which was usually enthroned in the inner sanctum of the temple.1 God had left Jerusalem and, riding on what seemed to be a massive war chariot, had come to live with the exiles in Babylon. A hand stretched towards Ezekiel holding a scroll, which was inscribed with ‘lamentations, wailing, and moanings’. ‘Eat this scroll,’ a divine voice commanded him, ‘feed and be satisfied by the scroll I am giving you.’ When he forced it down, accepting the pain and misery of his exile, Ezekiel found that ‘it tasted sweet as honey’.2

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Mark, who was writing immediately after the war, was especially preoccupied by this theme. His community was in deep trouble. Christians had been accused of rejoicing at the temple’s destruction, and Mark shows that members of his ekklesia were being beaten in the synagogues, dragged before the Jewish elders and universally vilified. Many had lost faith.62 Jesus’s teachings seemed to fall on stony ground and Christian leaders seemed as obtuse as the Twelve, who, in Mark’s gospel, rarely understood Jesus.63 There was a grim sense of painful rupture with mainstream Judaism. You could not patch an old garment with new cloth, Jesus warned: ‘the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse. And nobody puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and the skins too!’64 Discipleship meant suffering and an endless struggle with demonic forces. Christians must stay awake; they must be perpetually vigilant!65 Paul, who wrote while the temple was still standing, had scarcely mentioned it; but the temple was central to Mark’s vision of Jesus.66 Its destruction was only the first stage in the imminent apocalypse.67 Daniel had already foreseen this ‘desolating sacrilege’ long ago so the temple had been doomed.68 Jesus was not a renegade, as his enemies claimed, but deeply in tune with the great figures of the past. He quoted Jeremiah and Isaiah to show that the temple had been intended for all the nations as well as for the Jews.69 Mark’s ekklesia, which admitted gentiles, had fulfilled these ancient prophecies but the temple had not conformed to God’s plan. No wonder it had been destroyed. Jesus’s death was not a scandal, but had been foretold in the Law and the prophets:70 it had been foreseen that he would be betrayed by one of his own followers71 and deserted by his disciples.72 Yet the gospel ended on a note of terror. When the women went to anoint the body, they found that the tomb was empty. Even though an angel told them that Jesus had risen, ‘the women came out and ran away from the tomb because they were frightened out of their wits; and they said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid’.73 Mark’s story ended here, epitomizing the sense of fearful suspension that Christians experienced at this time. Yet Mark’s terse, brutal tale was ‘Good News’, because the kingdom had ‘already arrived’.74

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Hebrew prophets had declared that the Jews would return to their land before the end, so when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration (1917), pledging support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Christian fundamentalists felt a mixture of awe and exultation. Cyrus Scofield had suggested that Russia was ‘the power from the North’ 44 that would attack Israel before Armaggedon: the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), which made atheistic communism the state ideology, seemed to confirm this. The creation of the League of Nations after the war obviously fulfilled the prophecy of Revelation 16: 14. This was the revived Roman empire that would shortly be led by the Antichrist. What had once been a purely doctrinal dispute with the liberals was becoming a struggle for the future of civilization. When they read the Bible, Christian fundamentalists saw – and still see – themselves on the frontline against satanic forces that will shortly destroy the world. The wild tales of German atrocities circulating during and after the war seemed to prove the corrosive effects of the Higher Criticism on the nation that had spawned it. 45 It was a vision inspired by deep fear. Christian fundamentalists were now ambivalent about democracy, which could lead to the ‘most devilish rule this world has ever seen’. 46 Peace-keeping institutions such as the League of Nations – and, today, the United Nations – would always be associated with absolute evil: the Bible said that there would be war, not peace at the end, so the League was dangerously on the wrong track. Indeed, Antichrist himself, whom Paul had described as a plausible liar, would probably be a peacemaker. 47 Jesus was no longer a loving saviour, but the warlike Christ of Revelation, who, said Isaac Haldemann, one of the leading Rapture ideologues, ‘comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love . . . His garments are dipped in blood, the blood of others. He descends that he may shed the blood of men.’ 48 In the past, exegetes had tried to see the Bible as a whole. Now the selection of one text at the expense of others – the fundamentalist ‘canon within the canon’ – led to a shocking distortion of the gospel. In 1920, the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In his view, although the two were linked, it was not the Higher Criticism but Darwinism that had been responsible for the atrocities of the Great War. 49 Bryan’s research had convinced him that the Darwinian conviction that only the strong should survive had ‘laid the foundation for the bloodiest war in history’. It was no accident that ‘the same science that manufactured poisoned gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brutal ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and supernatural from the Bible’.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  CHAPTER 5 CharityBefore the conversion of Constantine in 312, it seemed unlikely that Christianity would survive, as Christians were subjected to sporadic but intense persecution by the Roman authorities. Once they had made it clear that they were no longer members of the synagogue, the Romans regarded the church as a superstitio of fanatics, who had committed the cardinal sin of impiety by breaking with the parent faith. Romans were highly suspicious of mass movements that threw off the restraints of tradition. Christians were also accused of atheism because they refused to honour the patronal gods of Rome and thus endangered the empire. The persecutions were designed to stamp out the faith and could easily have done so. As late as 303, the emperor Diocletian began a war of annihilation against the Christians. This time of terror and anxiety left its mark. The martyr, who was ready to follow Jesus to the death, became the Christian hero par excellence. Some Christians tried to persuade their pagan neighbours that Christianity was not a destructive break with past piety by writing apologiae, ‘rational explanations’, of their faith. One of their chief arguments was that Jesus’s life and death had been predicted by the Hebrew prophets, an argument that the Romans, with their respect for augury and oracles, took very seriously. The evangelists had relished their pesher exegesis, but the apologists found it more difficult. Once Marcion had urged Christians to jettison the Hebrew scriptures, gentile converts felt increasingly uneasy about their Jewish heritage.1 They no longer worshipped in the synagogues, so what had they to do with the Jewish god? Had God changed his mind about the old covenant? How could the sacred history of Israel be Christian history? What had the prophets really known about Jesus and how had they known it? Why had Isaiah and Zechariah been preoccupied by Jesus, the founder of a gentile religion?

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The persecutions were designed to stamp out the faith and could easily have done so. As late as 303, the emperor Diocletian began a war of annihilation against the Christians. This time of terror and anxiety left its mark. The martyr, who was ready to follow Jesus to the death, became the Christian hero par excellence. Some Christians tried to persuade their pagan neighbours that Christianity was not a destructive break with past piety by writing apologiae, ‘rational explanations’, of their faith. One of their chief arguments was that Jesus’s life and death had been predicted by the Hebrew prophets, an argument that the Romans, with their respect for augury and oracles, took very seriously. The evangelists had relished their pesher exegesis, but the apologists found it more difficult. Once Marcion had urged Christians to jettison the Hebrew scriptures, gentile converts felt increasingly uneasy about their Jewish heritage. 1 They no longer worshipped in the synagogues, so what had they to do with the Jewish god? Had God changed his mind about the old covenant? How could the sacred history of Israel be Christian history? What had the prophets really known about Jesus and how had they known it? Why had Isaiah and Zechariah been preoccupied by Jesus, the founder of a gentile religion? One of the earliest of these apologists was Justin (100–160), a pagan convert from Samaria in the Holy Land who eventually died as a martyr. He had studied various Greek philosophies, but found what he was looking for in Christianity. The logos in the prologue to John’s gospel reminded Justin of the fiery, divine breath that the Stoics believed organized the whole of reality and called Logos (‘Reason’), Pneuma (‘Spirit’) or God. Evidently Christians and pagans had a set of common symbols. In his two Apologiae, Justin argued that Jesus was the incarnation of the Logos, which had been active in the world throughout history, inspiring Greeks and Hebrews alike. It had spoken through the prophets, who had thus been able to foretell the coming of the messiah. The Logos had taken many forms before its definitive revelation in Jesus. It had spoken through Plato and Socrates. When Moses thought he heard God speaking from the burning bush, he had really been listening to the Logos. The oracles of the prophets had not been uttered ‘by the inspired [prophets] themselves, but by the divine Word who moved them’. 2 Sometimes the Logos had foretold the future; at other times, it spoke in the name of God.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  During the First World War, an element of terror entered conservative Protestantism in the United States: the unprecedented slaughter was on such a scale that, they reasoned, these must be the battles foretold in Revelation. Because conservatives now believed that every word of the Bible was literally true, they began to view current events as the fulfilment of precise biblical predictions. Hebrew prophets had declared that the Jews would return to their land before the end, so when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration (1917), pledging support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Christian fundamentalists felt a mixture of awe and exultation. Cyrus Scofield had suggested that Russia was ‘the power from the North’44 that would attack Israel before Armaggedon: the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), which made atheistic communism the state ideology, seemed to confirm this. The creation of the League of Nations after the war obviously fulfilled the prophecy of Revelation 16: 14. This was the revived Roman empire that would shortly be led by the Antichrist. What had once been a purely doctrinal dispute with the liberals was becoming a struggle for the future of civilization. When they read the Bible, Christian fundamentalists saw – and still see – themselves on the frontline against satanic forces that will shortly destroy the world. The wild tales of German atrocities circulating during and after the war seemed to prove the corrosive effects of the Higher Criticism on the nation that had spawned it.45 It was a vision inspired by deep fear. Christian fundamentalists were now ambivalent about democracy, which could lead to the ‘most devilish rule this world has ever seen’.46 Peace-keeping institutions such as the League of Nations – and, today, the United Nations – would always be associated with absolute evil: the Bible said that there would be war, not peace at the end, so the League was dangerously on the wrong track. Indeed, Antichrist himself, whom Paul had described as a plausible liar, would probably be a peacemaker.47 Jesus was no longer a loving saviour, but the warlike Christ of Revelation, who, said Isaac Haldemann, one of the leading Rapture ideologues, ‘comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love . . . His garments are dipped in blood, the blood of others. He descends that he may shed the blood of men.’48 In the past, exegetes had tried to see the Bible as a whole. Now the selection of one text at the expense of others – the fundamentalist ‘canon within the canon’ – led to a shocking distortion of the gospel.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  19 But neither J nor E mentioned the law that Yahweh gave to Moses on Sinai, which would become so crucial later. There was as yet no reference to the Ten Commandments. Almost certainly, as in other Near Eastern legend, the heavenly tablets given to Moses originally contained some esoteric cultic lore. 20 For J and E, Sinai was important because Moses and the Elders had a vision of Yahweh on the mountaintop. 21 By the eighth century, a small group of prophets wanted to make the people worship Yahweh exclusively. But this was not a popular move. As a warrior, Yahweh was unsurpassed, but he had no expertise in agriculture, so when they wanted a good harvest, it was natural for the people of Israel and Judah to have recourse to the cult of the local fertility god Baal and his sister-spouse Anat, practising the usual ritual sex to make the fields fertile. In the early eighth century, Hosea, a prophet in the northern kingdom, inveighed against this practice. His wife Gomer had served as a sacred prostitute of Baal and the pain he felt at her infidelity was, he imagined, similar to what Yahweh experienced when his people went whoring after other gods. Israelites must return to Yahweh, who could supply all their needs. It was no use hoping to appease him by temple ritual: Yahweh wanted cultic loyalty (hesed) not animal sacrifice. 22 If they continued to be unfaithful to Yahweh, the kingdom of Israel would be destroyed by the mighty Assyrian empire, their towns laid waste, and their children exterminated. 23 Assyria had established unprecedented power in the Middle East; it regularly devastated the territories of recalcitrant vassals and deported the population. The prophet Amos, who preached in Israel in the mid-eighth century, argued that Yahweh was leading a holy war against Israel to punish its systemic injustice. 24 As Hosea condemned the widely respected cult of Baal, Amos turned the traditional cult of Yahweh the warrior on its head: he no longer reflexively took Israel’s side. Amos also poured scorn on the temple rituals of the northern kingdom. Yahweh was sick of noisy chanting and devout strumming of harps. Instead he wanted justice to ‘flow like water, and integrity like an unfailing stream’. 25 From this early date, the biblical writings were subversive and iconoclastic, challenging prevailing orthodoxy. Isaiah of Jerusalem was more conventional; his oracles conformed entirely to the royal ideology of the House of David. He had received his prophetic commission in about 740 in the temple, where he saw Yahweh, surrounded by his Divine Assembly of celestial beings, and heard the cherubim crying ‘holy [qaddosh] holy, holy!’ 26 Yahweh was ‘separate’, ‘other’ and radically transcendent. Yahweh gave Isaiah a grim message: the countryside would be devastated and the inhabitants put to flight. 27 But Isaiah had no fear of Assyria.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Our speech makes us conscious of the transcendence that characterizes human experience . All this has affected the way we read the Bible, which for both Jews and Christians is the Word of God. Scripture has been an important element in the religious enterprise. In nearly all the major faiths, people have regarded certain texts as sacred and ontologically different from other documents. They have invested these writings with the weight of their highest aspirations, most extravagant hopes and deepest fears, and mysteriously the texts have given them something in return. Readers have encountered what seems like a presence in these writings, which thus introduce them to a transcendent dimension. They have based their lives on scripture – practically, spiritually and morally. When their sacred texts tell stories, people have generally believed them to be true, but until recently literal or historical accuracy has never been the point. The truth of scripture cannot be assessed unless it is – ritually or ethically – put into practice. The Buddhist scriptures, for example, give readers some information about the life of the Buddha, but have included only those incidents that show Buddhists what they must do to achieve their own enlightenment. Today scripture has a bad name. Terrorists use the Qur’an to justify atrocities, and some argue that the violence of their scripture makes Muslims chronically aggressive. Christians campaign against the teaching of evolutionary theory because it contradicts the biblical creation story. Jews argue that because God promised Canaan (modern Israel) to the descendants of Abraham, oppressive policies against the Palestinians are legitimate. There has been a scriptural revival that has intruded into public life. Secularist opponents of religion claim that scripture breeds violence, sectarianism and intolerance; that it prevents people from thinking for themselves, and encourages delusion. If religion preaches compassion, why is there so much hatred in sacred texts? Is it possible to be a ‘believer’ today when science has undermined so many biblical teachings? Because scripture has become such an explosive issue, it is important to be clear what it is and what it is not. This biography of the Bible provides some insight into this religious phenomenon. It is, for example, crucial to note that an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. Until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life. For centuries, Jews and Christians relished highly allegorical and inventive exegesis, insisting that a wholly literal reading of the Bible was neither possible nor desirable. They have rewritten biblical history, replaced Bible stories with new myths, and interpreted the first chapter of Genesis in surprisingly different ways.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  They burst into tears, frightened by these unfamiliar demands. ‘Do not weep!’ Ezra insisted. They now ‘understood the meaning of what had been proclaimed to them’. This was the season of Sukkoth, a festive time, and Ezra explained the law that commanded the Israelites to spend this sacred month in special ‘booths’ ( sukkoth ), in memory of their ancestors’ forty years in the wilderness. 5 At once, the people rushed into the hills to pick branches of olive, myrtle, pine and palm, and leafy shelters appeared all over the city. There was a carnival atmosphere, as the people assembled each evening to listen to Ezra’s exposition . Ezra had begun to craft a spiritual discipline based on a sacred text. The Torah had now been elevated above the other writings and, for the first time, was called ‘the law of Moses’. But, if it was simply read like any other text, the Torah could seem demanding and disconcerting. It must be heard in the contexts of rituals that separated it from ordinary life and put the audience in a different frame of mind. Because the people had begun to treat it differently, the Torah was becoming ‘sacred scripture’. Perhaps the most important element of this Torah spirituality was Ezra himself. 6 He was a priest, ‘a diligent scribe in the Torah of Moses’, and a guardian of tradition. 7 But he was also a new type of religious official: a scholar who ‘set his heart to investigate ( li-drosh ) the Torah of Yahweh and to do and teach law and ordinance in Israel’. 8 He was offering something different from the usual priestly instruction about ceremonial lore. The biblical author makes a point of telling us that ‘the hand of Yahweh rested upon him’ – a phrase traditionally used to describe the weight of inspiration that had descended on the prophets. 9 Before the exile, priests had been wont to ‘consult’ ( li-drosh ) Yahweh, by casting lots with the sacred objects known as Urim and Thummim. 10 The new seer was not a fortune teller but a scholar who could interpret the scriptures. The practice of midrash (exegesis) would always retain this sense of expectant inquiry. 11 Torah study was not an academic exercise but a spiritual quest. Yet Ezra’s reading had been prefaced by the threat of expulsion and seizure of property. It was followed by a more sombre assembly in the square in front of the temple, during which the people stood shivering as the torrential winter rains deluged the city and heard Ezra command them to send away their foreign wives. 12 Membership of Israel was now confined to the Golah and those who submitted to the Torah, the official law code of Judah. There was always the danger that enthusiasm for scripture could foster an exclusive, divisive and potentially cruel orthodoxy.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The horrors of the Second World War (1939–45) ended with the explosion of the first atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For centuries, men and women had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God. Now they had used their prodigious learning to find the means of doing this very efficiently for themselves. The death camp, the mushroom cloud, and – today – the wanton destruction of the environment reveal a nihilistic ruthlessness at the heart of modern culture. The interpretation of the Bible had always been affected by historical conditions, and during the twentieth century Jews and Christians, as well as Muslims, began to develop scripturally based ideologies that had absorbed the violence of modernity. During the First World War, an element of terror entered conservative Protestantism in the United States: the unprecedented slaughter was on such a scale that, they reasoned, these must be the battles foretold in Revelation. Because conservatives now believed that every word of the Bible was literally true, they began to view current events as the fulfilment of precise biblical predictions. Hebrew prophets had declared that the Jews would return to their land before the end, so when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration (1917), pledging support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Christian fundamentalists felt a mixture of awe and exultation. Cyrus Scofield had suggested that Russia was ‘the power from the North’ 44 that would attack Israel before Armaggedon: the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), which made atheistic communism the state ideology, seemed to confirm this. The creation of the League of Nations after the war obviously fulfilled the prophecy of Revelation 16: 14. This was the revived Roman empire that would shortly be led by the Antichrist. What had once been a purely doctrinal dispute with the liberals was becoming a struggle for the future of civilization. When they read the Bible, Christian fundamentalists saw – and still see – themselves on the frontline against satanic forces that will shortly destroy the world. The wild tales of German atrocities circulating during and after the war seemed to prove the corrosive effects of the Higher Criticism on the nation that had spawned it. 45 It was a vision inspired by deep fear. Christian fundamentalists were now ambivalent about democracy, which could lead to the ‘most devilish rule this world has ever seen’.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Jesus’s death was not a scandal, but had been foretold in the Law and the prophets: 70 it had been foreseen that he would be betrayed by one of his own followers 71 and deserted by his disciples. 72 Yet the gospel ended on a note of terror. When the women went to anoint the body, they found that the tomb was empty. Even though an angel told them that Jesus had risen, ‘the women came out and ran away from the tomb because they were frightened out of their wits; and they said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid’. 73 Mark’s story ended here, epitomizing the sense of fearful suspension that Christians experienced at this time. Yet Mark’s terse, brutal tale was ‘Good News’, because the kingdom had ‘already arrived’. 74 But by the time Matthew was writing in the late 80s, these hopes were beginning to fade. Nothing had changed: how could the kingdom have come? Matthew replied that it was coming unobtrusively, and was working silently in the world like yeast in a batch of dough. 75 His community was frightened and angry. They were accused by their fellow Jews of abandoning the Torah and the prophets; 76 they had been flogged in the synagogues, dragged before tribunals of elders, 77 and expected to be tortured and killed before the End. 78 Matthew was, therefore, especially anxious to show that Christianity was not only in harmony with Jewish tradition but was its culmination. Almost every single event in Jesus’s life had happened ‘to fulfil the scriptures’. Like Ishmael, Samson and Isaac, his birth was announced by an angel. 79 His forty days of temptation in the desert paralleled the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness; Isaiah had foretold his miracles. 80 And – most importantly – Jesus was a great Torah teacher. He proclaimed the new law of the messianic age from a mountaintop 81 – like Moses – and insisted that he had come not to abolish but to complete the Law and the prophets. 82 Jews must now observe the Torah more stringently than ever before. It was no longer sufficient for Jews to refrain from murder; they must not even get angry. Not only was adultery forbidden; a man could not even look at a woman lustfully. 83 The old law of retaliation – eye for eye, tooth for tooth – was superseded: Jews must now turn the other cheek and love their enemies. 84 Like Hosea, Jesus argued that compassion was more important than ritual observance. 85 Like Hillel, he preached the Golden Rule. 86 Jesus was greater than Solomon, Jonah and the temple.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The book of Revelation reveals the bitterness of Joannine Christianity. Here the dualism that was a recurrent motif in John’s gospels became a cosmic battle against good and evil forces. Satan and his cohorts assailed Michael and his angelic army in heaven, while the wicked attacked the good on earth. It seemed to the troubled ekklesia that evil must prevail, but John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, insisted that God would intervene at the critical moment and vanquish their enemies. He had received a special ‘revelation’ (apokalypsis), which would ‘unveil’ the true state of affairs, so that the faithful would know how to conduct themselves during the last days. The apocalypse is informed, through and through, by fear: the church was terrified of the Roman empire, the local Jewish communities and rival Christian groups. But, the author assured them, eventually Satan would give his authority to a Beast, who would rise from the depths of the sea and demand universal obeisance. Then the Lamb would come to the rescue. Even though the Whore of Babylon arrived drunk with the blood of the Christian martyrs, angels would pour seven hideous plagues over the earth and the Word would ride into battle on a white horse, to fight the Beast and fling him into a pit of fire. For a thousand years, Jesus would rule the earth with his saints, but then God would release Satan from prison. There would be more destruction, more battles until peace was restored and the New Jerusalem descended from heaven like a bride to meet the Lamb. Like all the Joannine writings, Revelation is deliberately obscure, its symbols unintelligible to outsiders. It is a toxic book and, as we shall see, would appeal to people who, like the Joannine churches, felt alienated and resentful. It was also controversial and some Christians were reluctant to include it in the canon. But when the final editors decided to place it at the end of the New Testament, it became the triumphant finale of their pesher exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures. It transformed the historical story of the rise of Christianity into a future-oriented apocalypse. The New Jerusalem would replace the old: ‘I saw no temple in the city, for its temple was the sovereign Lord God and the Lamb.’ Judaism and its most sacred symbols had been replaced by a victorious, militant Christianity.105