God Against the Gods (12 page)

He is remembered as Flavius Josephus, but he was born in Jerusalem about 37 C.E. as Yoseph Ben Mattiyahu. A wealthy and aristocratic Jew of priestly descent, Josephus was called upon to serve as governor general of Galilee, and he was placed in command of a Jewish army at the outset of the uprising against Roman occupation. But he counseled his fellow Jews against making war on Rome, and he surrendered to the Roman general Vespasian after surviving his first and only battle. Notably, Josephus declined to embrace the ideal of martyrdom as espoused by the Maccabees and the Zealots, and he contrived to escape the fate of his comrades in arms, who committed suicide
en masse
rather than be taken prisoner by the enemy.

The turncoat Jewish general put himself at the service of the Roman conquerors. He frankly depicts himself standing beneath the walls of besieged Jerusalem and calling on his fellow Jews to join him in surrender. For changing his colors, Josephus was rewarded with an apartment in the imperial palace at Rome and a life of leisure that afforded him the opportunity to write the histories and memoirs where some of the most crucial events in the history of Judaism and Christianity are recorded. He was exactly the kind of “Hellenized” Jew whom the Zealots would have deemed worthy of death, and yet it was Josephus and not the Zealots who lived to tell about the experience of the Jewish War.

Much of what we know about the Zealots, in fact, comes from the war memoir in which Josephus offers an eyewitness account of the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. He may have set himself against the “brigands” and “bandits” of the Jewish resistance, but he betrays a grudging admiration for the self-willed martyrs of Masada, praising “the nobility of their resolve” and their “utter contempt of death.”
³⁰
Still, the writings of Josephus amount to a kind of epitaph for the doctrine of holy war that begins in the Hebrew Bible but now disappears from Jewish history.

“God takes care of mankind,” muses Josephus on the futility of a war undertaken in the name of Yahweh, “but men perish by those miseries which they madly and voluntarily bring upon themselves.”
³¹

Josephus was proud of his Jewishness, and he used his writings to defend the Jewish people and explain Judaism to the pagan world. And yet, as a former politician and general, he understood the
realpolitik
that now governed the fate of the Jews in the Roman empire. A Jewish king like Josiah was able to carry out a purge of Judaism only because he commanded the power of the state. At his decree, rival sanctuaries for the worship of the God of Israel were closed and sealed, pagan shrines and statues were burned to ash and any priest who did not conform to his kind of Judaism was put to death. A Jewish general like Judah Maccabee was able to compel the forcible circumcision of his fellow Jews only because he commanded an army. The same resources, of course, are required in order to go to war, holy or otherwise, against a foreign enemy. Once the Jewish state was dismantled and the Jewish army was demobilized by victorious Rome, holy war was no longer an option.

The Rabbi in the Coffin

Now that the once glorious Temple that Herod had built was only a pile of broken stones, the sacrifice of animals that Yahweh is shown to demand in the Torah could no longer be offered. God, as King Josiah had determined when he found the lost scroll of the law, would not accept sacrifice from any place other than the one where “the Lord your God shall cause his name to dwell”
³²
—that is, the Temple at Jerusalem. So Judaism was forced to reinvent itself yet again.

The study of the sacred writings of Judaism—the Bible and, later, the anthology of religious law, legend and lore known as the Talmud—wholly replaced the rituals of blood sacrifice. Rabbis took the place of the hereditary male priests who once served at the Temple in Jerusalem as the spiritual leaders of the Jewish people. “Rabbi” literally means “my master,” and a rabbi functioned not only as a prayer leader but also as a teacher, a preacher, a scholar, a judge. Worship could be offered anywhere in the world where a
minyan
of ten Jews gathered.

The revolution in monotheism that followed the destruction of the Temple is summed up in a tale that is told about Yohanan ben Zakkai, a revered figure in the history of rabbinical Judaism. One of his fellow rabbis insists that the Jews are doomed because, now that the Temple is gone, they can no longer atone for their sins by offering sacrifices to Yahweh. “My son, be not grieved,” says Yohanan ben Zakkai, who goes on to quote some of the softer words of the prophet Hosea. “We have another atonement as effective as this, and what is it? It is acts of loving-kindness, as it is said, ‘For I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ ”
³³

Yohanan ben Zakkai, in fact, is the emblematic figure in the new kind of monotheism that constituted the practice of Judaism after the destruction of the Temple. He was a contemporary of Josephus, and he, too, made a separate peace with Rome. Yohanan ben Zakkai smuggled himself out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin, placed himself under the protection of the same Roman general to whom Josephus surrendered, and asked his captor only for a safe haven where he could establish a rabbinical academy to preserve and study the sacred law of Judaism. Just as Josephus was granted refuge in the imperial palace in Rome, where he wrote his memoirs, Yohanan ben Zakkai was permitted to establish a
yeshiva
at a place called Yavneh, where the writings that constitute the Hebrew Bible were finally canonized in 90 C.E.

So a strictly observant Jew like Yohanan ben Zakkai, no less than a “Hellenized” Jew like Josephus, demonstrates exactly how and why Judaism made its peace with paganism. The call to zealotry is replaced by the celebration of “acts of loving-kindness,” and rigorism is confined to the study and observance of religious law. The rabbis whose teachings are collected in the Talmud are
not
Bible literalists or religious fundamentalists: they preserve the passages of the Torah that command a faithful Jew to keep the Sabbath and the dietary laws of
kashrut
, but they overlook the passages that call on a faithful Jew to take up arms against the “abomination” of paganism. The pious rabbi and the turncoat general, as it turns out, adopt the very same stance toward pagan Rome.

“Pray for the peace of the ruling power,” advises Rabbi Hanin, one of the contemporaries of Yohanan ben Zakkai whose words are recorded in the Talmud, “since but for the fear of it men would have swallowed each other alive.”
³⁴

The ruling power, of course, was pagan Rome, which had just inflicted upon Judaism its cruelest defeat and greatest humiliation. Perhaps one million Jewish men, women and children died in the Jewish War, a casualty figure that prompts Bible critic Jack Miles to call it “the Roman Shoah” in
Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God
. The land of the Jews was reduced to the status of an occupied territory, and its name was changed from Judea to Palaestina, a reference to one of the traditional enemies of the Jewish people, the Philistines. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina, a tribute to the family name of the reigning emperor, and a shrine to Jupiter was erected on the site where the altar of Yahweh once stood. And yet, remarkably, the Roman authorities and the Jewish people found a way to forgive and forget.

“A Craze for Judaism”

The Jews were not universally loved in ancient Rome. Pagans, who were respectful toward the gods and goddesses of the people they conquered, resented the Jewish claim to be the “Chosen People” of the “Only True God.” The characteristics of Judaism that pagans found so obnoxious were only reinforced by the rite of circumcision, the dietary laws of
kashrut
and the strict observance of the Sabbath, all of which tended to keep the Jews to themselves. However, for exactly these reasons, Judaism was not regarded as much of a threat to paganism—few Roman men were willing to submit to circumcision, and neither men nor women were eager to give up the banquets for which Rome was so celebrated in order to keep the laws of
kashrut
.

In fact, despite all of these disincentives, the strange new idea of the Only True God began to exert a certain appeal to pagans, who were starting to entertain the notion of a supreme god even within the context of polytheism. Then, too, the pagans were impressed by the fact that the history of Judaism was fully as ancient as their own, and they were intrigued by the Jewish emphasis on the study of the Torah and other ancient texts. Tellingly, the very first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek—the so-called Septuagint—had been completed in the second century B.C.E. in Alexandria, the seat of Hellenistic civilization, and its translators had been commissioned by the pharaoh of Egypt, one of the rulers of the former empire of Alexander the Great.

By the first century of the Common Era, Rome was undergoing “a ‘craze’ for Judaism,” as historian and biographer A. N. Wilson puts it in
Paul: The Mind of the Apostle
. Curious pagans who attended Jewish services—the so-called God-fearers—were numerous enough that some synagoges were outfitted with special galleries to accommodate spectators.
³⁵
And the Jews were treated with a marked degree of respect and tolerance when it came to participation in the rituals of emperor worship that had become a kind of loyalty test in the Roman empire—the worshippers of the Only True God were officially permitted to pray
for
the emperor rather than
to
the emperor, a theological nicety that reveals something profound about the capacity of both Judaism and paganism to take a step back from rigorism.

Thus did a certain kind of zealotry pass out of Jewish tradition. The Jewish people, of course, would continue to provide martyrs in terrible abundance. But they would be men, women and children on whom martyrdom was imposed rather than besieged and defeated soldiers, like the Zealots at Masada, who preferred suicide over surrender. And the future martyrs were not victims of paganism; rather, by a terrible irony, their oppressors and persecutors would be fellow worshippers of the Only True God. For now, however, the Jewish people and pagan Rome made their peace with each other, and it was the soldiers of Christ who took up the banner of holy war and carried it into battle.

CHAPTER FOUR

CONFESSORS AND TRAITORS

Pagans and Christians Go to War in Ancient Rome

All degraded and shameful practices eventually collect and flourish in Rome.

—Tacitus

By the first century of the Common Era, just as Rome was reaching the high-water mark of its worldly empire, the classical paganism of Greece and Rome was already in decline. The old gods and goddesses were regarded by sophisticated Romans as the stuff of fairy tales and folklore rather than objects of awe and wonder: “That there is a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman with a long pole, and black frogs in the whirlpools of the Styx, that so many thousand men could cross the waves in a single boat,” writes the Roman poet Juvenal about the pagan myth of the underworld, “today even children refuse to believe.”
¹
Many of the minor deities had been reduced to bloodless and disembodied abstractions such as Victory and Fortune. And so the spiritual appetites that ordinary men and women have always experienced, and still do, went mostly un-sated by the stately rituals of the official cults.

But, then, the ceremonies of worship conducted by the priestly colleges were never intended to meet the intimate spiritual needs of the citizenry of ancient Rome. Rather, they were designed to earn divine favor for the Roman empire in all of its power and glory. The proper sacrifices offered in the proper way, it was hoped, would ensure the life and health of the emperor, the safe arrival of grain ships from Africa and victory in battle for the Roman legions against the “barbarian” tribes threatening the border provinces in western Europe and the armies of the Persian empire, the rival superpower on the eastern frontier. What we call religion was regarded by the ruling class of ancient Rome as a civic duty and an essential component of statecraft.

That is why, for example, the
Pontifex Maximus
—the high priest of the state religion of ancient Rome—was the emperor himself. His priestly duties were intended to preserve the so-called
Pax Deorum
, or “peace of the gods,” the deal by which the Romans purchased divine protection with the currency of smoke from burning incense and blood of slaughtered cattle. For the ordinary man or woman who sought some kind of comfort from the gods, the high ceremonials of imperial cult had little or nothing to offer. “Never did a people of advanced culture have a more infantile religion,” declares the historian Franz Cumont. “In Greece as well as Rome, it was reduced to a collection of unintelligible rites, scrupulously and mechanically reproduced without addition or omissions because they had been practised by the ancestors of long ago.”
²

But paganism is a term that encompasses far more than the worship of the Olympian gods and goddesses who enliven the pages of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. In the backwaters and byways of the Roman empire, a phantasmagorical assortment of odd and beguiling deities were offered prayer and sacrifice, and the rituals by which they were worshipped were as strange and exotic as the gods and goddesses themselves. As Rome conquered new lands and peoples, as the network of Roman roads and the routes of Roman trading ships reached out to link the farthest stretches of the sprawling empire to the imperial capital, many of these new beliefs and practices began to catch the attention of the Roman citizenry.

Rome was the center of gravity of the ancient world, its commercial and diplomatic capital, a rich source of patronage for arts and letters, a market for goods and services of all kinds and a magnet for fortune seekers from every far-flung province of the empire. Rome was crowded with people who brought with them the languages and folkways of countless different cultures—diplomats and traders from all over the ancient world, soldiers and sailors who had served in the remote outposts of the empire and slaves who were imported from conquered lands to work in the imperial capital. The cultural baggage that they carried with them included an astounding array of spiritual beliefs and practices, all of which were offered in the Roman marketplace of religion like so many intriguing baubles.

“Who can tell,” muses Cumont, “what influence chambermaids from Antioch or Memphis gained over the minds of their mistresses?”
³

Soldiers of Christ

Precisely because the oldest traditions of classical paganism seemed so hollow and brittle to so many of the Romans, the acolytes of new and exotic gods and goddesses found an attentive audience. Because many of the most beguiling new faiths originated in the eastern stretches of the Roman empire, they are known in older works of scholarship as “Oriental” or “Asian” religions. Because they promised to reveal to their initiates the divine secrets that are hidden from ordinary human beings, they are also called mystery religions. Among the most provocative—and, for that reason, among the most popular—of the Eastern mystery religions that reached ancient Rome were the cults of the Persian god Mithra, the Syrian goddess
Magna Mater
, the Great Mother of the Gods, and the Egyptian goddess Isis.

But these three pagan imports were not the only “Oriental mystery religions” on offer in Rome. From the newly subjugated province of Palestine came the worshippers of the god called Yahweh, and their insistence on offering prayer to one god alone was so intriguing that their synagogues were crowded with the curious pagans who came to be known as “God-fearers.” By the first century, in fact, perhaps 10 percent of the population of the Roman empire was Jewish, and the readership of prominent Jewish authors like Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, who explained the history and beliefs of Judaism in language that a Hellenist could understand, including the ruling class of pagan Rome.

Nor was Judaism the only monotheism from the Middle East that offered its teachings to the pagan world. In the first century, the practitioners of a new faith that embraced Jesus of Nazareth as a God-sent savior—a figure known in Jewish tradition as the Messiah (literally, “Anointed One”)—reached the imperial capital. “Messiah” is translated into Greek in the Septuagint as “
Christos
,” and so the followers of Jesus came to be called “Christians.” They had started out as one of the dozens of sects and schisms within Judaism as it was practiced in Palestine, but now they insisted that they alone knew the proper way to worship the Only True God.

Here we see the first stirrings of a new kind of rigorism that was ready to erupt into the pagan world. As Christianity emerged from Palestine and spread throughout the Roman empire, the beliefs and practices of the early Christians remained in a state of revolutionary flux. The very idea of Christianity—and, therefore, the organization, leadership and rituals of the Christian church—were something wholly new, and even a theological question as fundamental as whether Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God or God himself would still be hotly debated by Christians three centuries after his crucifixion. But the one belief shared by all of the early Christians distinguished them from all the other men and women of the Roman empire except the Jews: they were strict and uncompromising monotheists.

Paganism can be likened to a noisy and colorful bazaar where merchants hawk their wares, each one declaring the superiority of the god or goddess whom he or she is offering to the crowd—Apollo or Aphrodite, Mithra or Isis, and countless others, too. They might try to outshout one another, but they do not engage in brawls. The earnest advocates of the Only True God, however, enter the bazaar with the sure conviction that all other gods and goddesses are not merely inferior but counterfeit. Significantly, they call themselves Soldiers of Christ, and they see the encounter between monotheism and polytheism not as a competition of ideas and values in the marketplace of religion but as nothing less than a holy war.

“Call Me by My True Name”

All the so-called mystery religions, whether they advertised one god or many, appealed to the jaded spiritual appetites of pagan Rome with novel, colorful and highly provocative rituals and beliefs. All of them sought to restore a sense of mystery to the practice of religion. They did not neglect the intimate and practical concerns that moved their congregants to prayer—happiness in marriage, healing of illness, safety while traveling, a full purse and a full belly—but they also offered answers to a question that has always plagued humankind: How can a mortal man or woman secure the favor of the invisible power that rules our fate? Above all, they all held out the tantalizing and even thrilling opportunity of achieving, if only for a moment, a direct encounter with the divine.

The worshippers of Mithra, for example, were initiated into their new faith in the ritual of the taurobolium, a so-called baptism of blood that reenacted a key event in the myth that had been imported from Persia along with the god himself—the slaying of a sacred bull by Mithra. The initiate was conducted into an underground shrine in which a wooden platform had been erected; a bull was made to stand on the platform, and the initiate stood beneath it; when the bull was sacrificed to Mithra by the priest, its blood poured down through an opening in the floor of the platform and literally showered the initiate. The “red baptism,” as Franz Cumont describes the ritual of the taurobolium, was not meant to promote the health of the emperor or the security of the empire.
⁴
Rather, it was an act of personal salvation, and the initiate who underwent the ritual of the taurobolium was believed to experience “the new birth to eternal life.”
⁵

The taurobolium was also employed in the worship of the
Magna Mater
, a goddess of love and fertility who had been imported from Phrygia in Asia Minor in the late third century B.C.E. and granted a place in the pantheon of Hellenism—she was dubbed Rhea by the Greeks and Cybele by the Romans. According to one version of the myth that came to be associated with Cybele, the goddess fell in love with a young shepherd called Attis and sought to prevent his marriage to a mortal woman by sending him into a frenzy of desire for Cybele on his wedding day, but he frustrated her efforts by committing suicide in an act of self-emasculation; the grief-stricken goddess then prevailed on the high god Zeus to restore Attis to life. The ritual of initiation into the cult of Cybele included a period of fasting, followed by the consumption of libations with high alcoholic content and, finally, a spell of music, drumming and dancing. At the climax of the ritual, the most frenzied celebrants castrated themselves with axes or swords in imitation of Attis, thus performing what historian Jocelyn Godwin delicately calls “the irreversible act.”
⁶

A less delicate account of the same bloody spectacle is provided by James Frazer, who allows us to see exactly how and why the mystery religions appealed to a citizenry that was jaded and bored by the formulaic rites of classical paganism. “While the flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives,” he writes in
The Golden Bough
, “the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers.”
⁷

Man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suite of female attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.
⁸

A third mystery religion that came to Rome—perhaps the most successful of them all—was the cult of Isis and Serapis, which began in Egypt and spread all over the empire. Isis, of course, was a prominent and powerful member of the pantheon of ancient Egypt. According to sacred myth, Isis restores life to Osiris, her brother and lover, after he has been murdered and dismembered by a third sibling called Seth. Isis gathers up all of the body parts except the penis, which she replaces with a prosthetic device fashioned out of wax and spices, and restores her dead sibling-lover to life. By tradition, each reigning pharaoh was regarded as the living embodiment of the son of Isis and Osiris, the demigod called Horus.

After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, however, one of his successor-kings seized upon the myth of Isis and Osiris and made it over into a Hellenistic cult. The beguiling Isis survived intact, but Osiris was conflated with another Egyptian god and transformed into a new deity called Serapis. “We need not wonder, then, that in a period when traditional faiths were shaken, when systems clashed, when men’s minds were disquieted, when the fabric of the empire itself, once deemed eternal, began to show ominous rents and fissures,” writes Frazer, “the serene figure of Isis should have appeared to many like a star in a stormy sky, and roused in their breasts a rapture of devotion not unlike that which was paid in the Middle Ages to the Virgin Mary.”
⁹

These three mystery religions are all examples of syncretism at work, the mixing and matching of religious beliefs and practices that was the hallmark of high paganism. The taurobolium was borrowed from the worship of the Great Mother and put to use in the worship of Mithra. The cult of Isis and Serapis was an act of pure invention, the mating of an ancient Egyptian goddess with a hybridized Hellenistic god. The Great Mother originated in Phrygia but, as we have seen, she was identified with the Greek fertility goddess called Rhea and her Roman counterpart, Cybele. In fact,
all
of the many goddesses of sex, love and fertility whose worshippers were found in the backwaters and byways of the ancient world were eventually hailed in some pagan circles as incarnations of one great goddess.