Bible and Sword (3 page)

The evidence for it centers on the use of tin as a Bronze Age alloy in the East. Tin was mined in Cornwall about that time. Tin appeared as an article of commerce in the markets of Tyre, as we know from the report of the prophet Ezekiel, about 600 B.C. This tin, according to Herodotus, writing in 440 B.C., came from the Isles of the Cassiterides, a name that offers no geographical clue at all, because
it simply means “tin” in Greek. However, it came to be identified by all the classical geographers following Herodotus as either the Scilly Isles off Cornwall or as Cornwall itself.

As Camden was the first to put the Gomer-Cimbri-Celt genealogy on a modern footing, so was he the first to bring out the role of the Phoenicians in ancient Britain. With the revival of classical learning in sixteenth-century Europe, English scholars, following Camden, unearthed all the references to the tin trade of the ancients, finding to their delight that through this means Britain’s antiquity could be pushed back to equal that of ancient Greece and Troy and the lands of the Bible. One seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar, Aylett Sammes, was so carried away on the wings of this theory that he wrote a book called
The Antiquities of Ancient Britain Derived from the Phoenicians
in which he proved that “the language itself for the most part, as well as the Customs, Religions, Idols, Offices, Dignities of the ancient Britons are all clearly Phoenician.”

Another Phoenician monopoly, the famous purple dye derived from shellfish, provided a further clue when pre-Bronze Age shell dumps of the particular kind yielding the purple dye were found on the Cornwall and Devon coasts.

More significant than the tin and shells was the evidence in stone. The mighty and incredible stone monuments at Stonehenge and Avebury, raised, no one knows how, by primitive sun-worshipers in Britain, have an unmistakable affinity with the Canaanite use of sacred stones in the worship of various local Baals. Dr. Borlase, a pioneer Cornish archaeologist, digging among the rich prehistoric mounds of his native Cornwall, thought that the “rude obelisks” found in Britain might have been erected by early Phoenician visitors in honor of their own national deities, “it being the notorious infatuation of Canaanitish nations to pay divine honors to such rude stones.” This was written as early as 1769.

Borlase and succeeding scholars believed the Phoenicians discovered Britain about 1400 B.C. Curiously enough,
modern archaeologists give 1400 B.C. as the approximate date of Stonehenge and Avebury. They ascribe the stones, of course, not to Phoenicians or Druids, but to the Beaker people, members of the Indo-European family of nations, who, from a starting point in western Mediterranean lands, spread over the Alps and into Britain about 1800 B.C. at the beginning of the Bronze Age. Large-boned muscular people of nomadic culture, depending chiefly on herds but acquainted with agriculture, they had round heads and built round barrows. In Britain they dispossessed the earlier Neolithic population, who (conveniently) had long heads and built long barrows. Archaeologists are immensely fond of the Beaker folk, whose astonishing migrations they trace all over Europe by a trail of Beaker shreds, metal buttons, and belt buckles. But whatever their aptitudes, they are too lately known to compete as forefathers in the imagination of a Bible-reading people. A buried skeleton in a barrow, with no matter how many beakers and buckles, is not so attractive an ancestor as the rulers of ancient Tyre and Sidon
^*
so familiar from the pages of the Old Testament.

The tradition achieved formal embodiment when Lord Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, was commissioned to paint a mural depicting “Ancient Commerce” on the walls of the Royal Exchange in London. Here for all to see are the black-bearded Phoenicians spreading out lengths of purple cloth before avid Britons who offer hides and ingots of tin in exchange.

In the year 146 B.C. the battle between Carthage and Rome for mastery of the Mediterranean world was won
finally by the Romans. From then on the Phoenicians fade from history, and the temporal power of the East passed to the marching men of Italy. They were soon to be masters of both Palestine and Britain and to provide another link between the two.

When Britain first emerged out of the fog of prehistory into the pages of Julius Caesar’s
Commentaries
the Temple of the Jews was still standing. During the next century or so, between the time of Caesar and the fall of the Temple in 70 A.D., Rome subjugated both Judaea and Britain. Jews and Britons alike became fellow subjects of the Roman Empire, linked by the omnipresent Roman legion.

Pompey entered Jerusalem in 63 B.C. when the feeble heir of the once great Maccabean dynasty called in Roman help against his equally worthless brother. The Romans, of course, stayed. Pompey reduced Judaea to the status of province, and though it later temporarily enjoyed the rank of dependent kingdom under Herod, it remained part of the Roman Empire.

The same pattern of civil strife opening the way to the Roman conqueror was to be played out in Britain. Though Caesar had won an engagement against the Britons, he could not complete the conquest, having his hands full in Gaul and trouble enough at home. But Rome’s august shadow now lay on Britain. The opportunity to replace the shadow with the substance came in the fourth decade A.D. when the Emperor Claudius reigned at Rome and Cinobo-line or Cymbeline was a king in Britain. Rebellious sons, factious tribes, and questions of tribute had produced civil war in Britain, in the course of which a rebel chieftain went to Rome for aid, revealed the internecine struggles of his countrymen, and came back with the all too willing legions at his heels. The bookish Claudius, though no fighter, was no fool, and he could see a chance for conquest
as well as any military man. When the dust had cleared, there stood the Roman as usual. Claudius came to Britain to celebrate his triumph in person and erected a victory arch in honor of the occasion at home.

Parallels between their fortunes continue. The rising of the Celtic tribes under Boadicea and the rising of the Jews in Judaea took place at opposite ends of Nero’s empire in the same decade. Both risings were hopeless from the start, both were inspired by fanatic patriotism and maintained by desperate courage, and both failed. In 81 A.D. Boadicea, goaded by Roman brutalities, raised an army whose spiked chariots swept savagely over the Roman settlements in a mighty burst for freedom. It was a valiant stroke that could not be sustained. Roman re-enforcements crossed the channel, crushed the Queen’s revolt, massacred her people, and marked the last attempt of Celtic Britain to throw off the Roman yoke. Six years later when Jewish zealots similarly tried to unseat their Roman rulers, they withstood the armies of Vespasian and Titus for three years. But at the last, starved out, Jerusalem was taken by storm, the Temple razed by fire never to rise again, and Jewish statehood canceled.

What mad notion of succeeding against Rome, when every other nation had failed, had driven the Jews to this? the handsome Titus asked, and he reminded them of the recent defeat of the Britons. In the person of this young general, the future emperor and the “darling of the Gods,” Palestine and Britain had met, as he himself was aware. As he stood that day on the crumbling ramparts the flames roared and crackled through the sacred Temple that he had tried vainly to preserve against the fanaticism of its last-ditch defenders and the mob anger of his own troops. From inside the walls rose the stench of months of unburied bodies felled by starvation in the streets. Outside the walls stood a forest of crosses with their rotting burden of civilians caught between starvation and the Romans, captured and crucified by the besiegers as each night they
sought to creep out from the doomed city. The walls of the city had only brought its death. Titus, as he looked around, was reminded of another wall that had failed its defenders. “Pray,” he asked the prisoners, “what greater obstacle is there than the wall of the ocean which encompasses the Britons and yet they bow down before the arms of the Romans?”

If the coincidence struck Titus, it made an even more profound impression on the English in the Christian era. They believed that the Roman conquest was an expression of the Divine wrath, upon the Britons for being heathen and upon the Jews for rejecting Jesus. The appearance of Vespasian as the instrument of retribution in both instances seemed, in Christian times, clearly an intervention of God. Vespasian himself, a hearty materialist of the reddest Roman vintage, would have been astonished to learn that later generations would refer to him as the divine instrument of a God he had never heard of.

A sense of the romance of history seems almost to insist that, in that moment of time when the fates of Jews and Britons touched briefly, the two rebel peoples must have had some experience of each other. Rome, we know, impressed her subject peoples, including Jews and Britons, into military duty in the auxiliary legions, and these could see service in any part of the Empire. Might there have been any Jewish soldiers in the legions that burned Londinium when it was held by the rebel forces of Boadicea, or any Britons in the legions that stormed the walls of Jerusalem under Titus?

If evidence could be found anywhere, it would be in the records of the two greatest contemporary historians, Tacitus the Roman and Josephus the Jew. Both wrote of events in which they themselves had participated, Josephus in
The Jewish War
and Tacitus in his
Agricola
. But in neither does any evidence turn up of Britons in Judaea or Jews in Britain.

Josephus wrote that there was not a people in the world
who had not some Jews among them; and this can be verified by references among the ancient writers to Jewish communities in every province of the Empire from Persia to Spain, with the one exception of Britain. It is perfectly possible, indeed probable, that in the wake of the Romans Jewish merchants or captive slaves from Palestine did reach this farthest outpost of the Empire. Yet if they did, they left no traces. A single brick and one Jewish coin dug up by chance in London two hundred years apart inspired pages of speculation by enthusiasts, but actually signify nothing. The brick, found in Mark Lane in 1670, was of Roman manufacture and bore on its face a bas-relief showing Samson setting fire to the foxes’ tails as he drove them into a field of corn. But this proves little, for others besides the Jews knew the Old Testament stories, and in any event the Jews rarely personified their people in pictures. The coin, minted in Judaea during the bitter few years of independence wrested from Rome by Simon Bar Cochba in 132–35 A.D. equally fails to prove a Jewish habitation in London, since it might well have been brought by an individual trader or by a Roman soldier who could have picked it up as a souvenir of battle.

But it calls to mind another curious coincidence. Again a general from Britain, in this case the Emperor’s legate, Julius Sextus Severus, had to be called to Palestine before Bar Cochba’s furious and fanatic revolt could be quelled. And, like Titus two generations earlier, he brought a fearful punishment upon the Jews. Thenceforward they were forbidden to enter Jerusalem, and all but a remnant were exiled from Palestine.

Despite all these coincidences the historian must come away empty-handed from the search for evidence of actual contact between the two peoples at that time. And from then on their fates diverged. The Jews lost their country, but somehow retained their sense of nationality in exile. The Celts of Britain remained in their country, but lost their nationality under a succession of alien conquerors.

The search for national origins was duplicated in the search for religious origins. National pride demanded for the British church a personified founder, sought him directly in Palestine, and found him in the person of Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph was the rich Jew and secret disciple who sat silent when the Sanhedrin, of which he was a member, voted to hand Jesus over to the civilian arm of Pilate. Later Joseph came forward publicly to claim Jesus’ body and give it burial. He was the first person of wealth and influence to join the new sect and was no doubt regarded as a “traitor to his class,” for the Galilean gospel was not addressed to the rich and wellborn.

His legend centers in the Abbey of Glastonbury, the oldest in England, which he is credited with having founded. In one of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King a monk speaks:

Tennyson of course took Joseph from Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
. In that account Joseph, “by fortune come unto thys lande that at that time was called Grete Bretayne,”
was able to “disheryt” a “grete felon paynim” who ruled the country, and “after that all the people withturned to the Crystyn feythe.”

Malory’s work, however, was not the beginning but the end product of centuries of half history, half legend that, with each successive chronicler, increased by what it fed on. By the time medieval chroniclers and romance poets had done with him Joseph emerged not only as the author of Celtic Britain’s conversion to Christianity and as bringer of the Grail, but also as the ancestor of Britain’s greatest national hero, King Arthur, and the link in some mysterious fashion between Arthur and Israel’s national hero, King David.

Why did English tradition settle on the figure of Joseph rather than any other? Perhaps the answer is that he actually did make his way from Palestine to Britain. Other apostles voyaged far from Judaea to carry the gospel, and the Roman ways to Britain were open. At any rate no one can say positively that he did not: one cannot prove a negative, especially when records of the time are so meager. Joseph at least had one important qualification: he was an actor in the events that gave birth to Christianity. From among the Twelve Apostles Rome had chosen Peter, Spain had James, France had Philip, nor could British national pride be satisfied with anyone less immediate to the original scene.