Holy Blood, Holy Grail (48 page)

In any case the point is that the episode, and the passage quoted above, do not appear in any modern or accepted version of Mark.

Indeed, the only references to Lazarus or a Lazarus figure in the New Testament are in the

Gospel ascribed to John. It is thus clear that Clement’s advice was accepted not only by Theodore, but by subsequent authorities as well.

Quite simply the entire Lazarus incident was completely excised from the

Gospel of Mark.

If Mark’s Gospel was so drastically expurgated, it was also burdened with spurious’ additions. In its original version it ends with the Crucifixion, the burial and the empty tomb. There is no Resurrection scene, no reunion with the disciples. Granted, there are certain modern Bibles which do contain a more conventional ending to the Gospel of Mark an ending which does include the Resurrection. But virtually all modern Biblical scholars concur that this expanded ending is a later addition, dating from the late second century and appended to the original document.5

The Gospel of Mark thus provides two instances of a sacred document supposedly inspired by God which has been tampered with, edited, censored, revised by human hands. Nor are these two cases speculative. On the contrary, they are now accepted by scholars as demonstrable and proven.

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Can one then suppose that Mark’s Gospel was unique in being subjected to alteration? Clearly if Mark’s

Gospel was so readily doctored, it is reasonable to assume that the other

Gospels were similarly treated.

For the purposes of our investigation, then, we could not accept the Gospels as definitive and unimpugnable authority, but, at the same time we could not discard them. They were certainly not wholly fabricated, and they furnished some of the few clues available to what really happened in the

Holy Land two thousand years ago. We therefore undertook to look more closely, to winnow through them, to disengage fact from fable, to separate the truth they contained from the spurious matrix in which that truth was often embedded. And in order to do this effectively, we were first obliged to familia rise ourselves with the historical reality and circumstances of the Holy Land at the advent of the Christian era. For the Gospels are not autonomous entities, conjured out of the void and floating, eternal and universal, over the centuries. They are historical documents, like any other like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the epics of Homer and Virgil, the Grail romances. They are products of a very specific place, a very specific time, a very specific people and very specific historical factors.

Palestine at the Time of Jesus

Palestine in the first century was a very troubled corner of the globe.

For some time the Holy Land had been fraught with dynastic squabbles, internecine strife and, on occasion, full-scale war. During the second century B.C. a more or less unified Judaic kingdom was transiently established as chronicled by the two Apocryphal Books of Maccabees. By 63

B.C.” however, the land was in upheaval again, and ripe for conquest.

More than half a century before Jesus’s birth, Palestine fell to the armies of Pompey, and Roman rule was imposed. But Rome at the time was over-extended, and too preoccupied with her own affairs, to install the administrative apparatus necessary for direct rule. She therefore created a line of puppet kings to rule under her aegis. This line was that of the

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Herodians who were not Jewish, but Arab. The first of the line was Antipater, who assumed the throne of Palestine in 63 B.C. On his death in 37 B.C.” he was succeeded by his son, Herod the Great, who ruled until 4 B.C. One must visualise, then, a situation analogous to that of France under the Vichy government between 1940

and 1944. One must visualise a conquered land and a conquered people, ruled by a puppet regime which was kept in power by military force. The people of the country were allowed to retain their own religion and customs.

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But the final authority was Rome. This authority was implemented according to Roman

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In A.D. 6 the situation became more critical. In this year the country was split administratively into two provinces, Judaea and Galilee.

Herod

Antipas became king of the latter. But Judaea the spiritual and secular capital -was rendered subject to direct Roman rule,

administered by a Roman

Procurator based at Caesarea. The Roman regime was brutal and autocratic.

When it assumed direct control of Judaea more than three thousand rebels were summarily crucified. The Temple was plundered and defiled.

Heavy taxation was imposed. Torture was frequently employed, and many of the populace committed suicide. This state of affairs was not improved by

Pontius Pilate, who presided as procurator of Judaea from A.D. 26 to 36. In contrast to the Biblical portraits of him, existing records indicate that

Pilate was a cruel and corrupt man, who not only perpetuated, but intensified, the abuses of his predecessor. It is thus all the more surprising at least on first glance that there should be no criticism of Rome in the Gospels, no mention even of the burden of the Roman yoke.

Indeed the Gospel accounts suggest that the inhabitants of Judaea were placid and contented with their lot.

In point of fact very few were contented, and many were far from placid.

The Jews in the Holy Land at the time could be loosely divided into several sects and sub sects There were, for example, the Sadducees a small but wealthy land-owning class who, to the anger of their compatriots, collaborated, Quisling-fashion, with the Romans. There were the Pharisees - a progressive group who introduced much reform into Judaism and who, despite the portrait of them in the Gospels, placed

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Map 9 Palestine at the Time of Jesus

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themselves in staunch, albeit largely passive, opposition to Rome.

There were the Essenes an austere, mystically oriented sect, whose teachings were much more prevalent and influential than is generally acknowledged or supposed. Among the smaller sects and sub-sects there were many whose precise character has long been lost to history, and which, therefore, are difficult to define. It is worth citing the Nazorites, however, of whom

Samson, centuries before, had been a member, and who were still in existence during Jesus’s time. And it is worth citing the Nazoreans or Nazarenes a term which seems to have been applied to Jesus and his followers. Indeed the original Greek version of the New Testament refers to Jesus as “Jesus the

Nazarene’ which is mistranslated in English as “ esus of Nazareth’.

“Nazarene’, in short, is a specifically sectarian word and has no connection with Nazareth.

There were numerous other groups and sects as well, one of which proved of particular relevance to our inquiry. In A.D. 6, when Rome assumed direct control of Judaea, a Pharisee rabbi known as Judas of Galilee had created a highly militant revolutionary group composed, it would appear, of both

Pharisees and Essenes. This following became known as Zealots. The Zealots were not, strictly speaking, a sect. They were a movement, whose membership was drawn from a number of sects. By the time of Jesus’s mission, the

Zealots had assumed an increasingly prominent role in the Holy Land’s affairs. Their activities formed perhaps the most important political backdrop against which Jesus’s drama enacted itself. Long after the Crucifixion, Zealot activity continued unabated. By A.D. 44 this activity had so intensified that some sort of armed struggle already seemed inevitable. In A.D. 66 the struggle erupted, the whole of Judaea rising in organised revolt against Rome. It was a desperate, tenacious but ultimately futile conflict reminiscent in certain respects of, say, Hungary in 1956.

At Caesarea alone 20,000 Jews were massacred by the Romans. Within four years Roman legions had occupied Jerusalem, razed the city, and sacked and plundered the Temple. Nevertheless the mountain fortress of Masada held out for yet another three years, commanded by a lineal descendant of Judas of

Galilee.

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The aftermath of the revolt in Judaea witnessed a massive exodus of Jews from the Holy Land. Nevertheless enough remained to foment another rebellion some sixty years later in A.D. 132. At last, in 135, the Emperor Hadrian decreed that all Jews be expelled by law from Judaea, and Jerusalem became essentially a Roman city. It was renamed Aelia

Capitolina.

Jesus’s lifetime spanned roughly the first thirty-five years of a turmoil extending over 140

years. The turmoil did not cease with his death, but continued for another century. And it engendered the psychological and cultural adjuncts inevitably attending any such sustained defiance of an oppressor. One of these adjuncts was the hope and longing for a Messiah who would deliver his people from the tyrant’s yoke. It was only by virtue of historical and semantic accident that this term came to be applied specifically and exclusively to Jesus.

For Jesus’s contemporaries, no Messiah would ever have been regarded as divine. Indeed the very idea of a divine Messiah would have been preposterous if not unthinkable. The Greek word for Messiah is

“Christ’ or

“Christos’. The term whether in Hebrew or Greek -meant simply “the anointed one’ and generally referred to a king. Thus David, when he was anointed king in the Old Testament, became, quite explicitly, a

“Messiah’ or a “Christ’. And every subsequent Jewish king of the house of David was known by the same appellation. Even during the Roman occupation of Judaea, the Roman-appointed high priest was known as the

“Priest Messiah’ or

“Priest Christ’.”

For the Zealots, however, and for other opponents of Rome, this puppet priest was, of necessity, a “false Messiah’. For them the “true Messiah’ implied something very different the legitimate roi perdu or “lost king’, the unknown descendant of the house of David who would deliver his people from Roman tyranny. During Jesus’s lifetime anticipation of the coming of such a Messiah attained a pitch verging on mass hysteria. And this anticipation continued after Jesus’s death.

Indeed the revolt of A.D. 66 was prompted in large part by Zealot agitation and propaganda on behalf of a

Messiah whose advent was said to be imminent.

The term “Messiah’, then, implied nothing in any way divine. Strictly

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defined, it meant nothing more than an anointed king; and in the popular mind it came to mean an anointed king who would also be a liberator. In other words, it was a term with specifically political connotations something quite different from the later Christian idea of a “Son of God’. It was this mundane political term that was applied to Jesus. He was called “Jesus the Messiah’ or translated into Greek

“Jesus the Christ’. Only later was this designation contracted to

“Jesus

Christ’ and a purely functional title distorted into a proper name.

The History of the Gospels

The Gospels issued from a recognisable and concrete historical reality. It was a reality of oppression, of civic and social discontent, of political unrest, of incessant persecution and intermittent rebellion. It was also a reality suffused with perpetual and tantalising promises, hopes and dreams that a rightful king would appear, a spiritual and secular leader who would deliver his people into freedom. So far as political freedom was concerned, such aspirations were brutally extinguished by the devastating war between A.D. 66 and 74. Transposed into a wholly religious form, however, the aspirations were not only perpetuated by the Gospels, but given a powerful new impetus.

Modern scholars are unanimous in concurring that the Gospels do not date from Jesus ;s lifetime. For the most part they date from the period between the two major revolts in Judaea - 66 to 74 and 132 to 135 although they are almost certainly based on earlier accounts. These earlier accounts may have included written documents since lost for there was a wholesale destruction of records in the wake of the first rebellion. But there would certainly have been oral traditions as well. Some of these were undoubtedly grossly exaggerated and/or distorted, received and transmitted at second, third or fourth hand. Others, however, may have derived from individuals who were alive in Jesus’s lifetime and may even have known him personally.

A young man at the time of the Crucifixion might well have been alive when the Gospels were composed.

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The earliest of the Gospels is generally considered to be Mark’s, composed sometime during the revolt of 66-74 or shortly thereafter except for its treatment of the Resurrection, which is a later and spurious addition. Although not himself one of Jesus’s original disciples,

companion of

Saint Paul, and his Gospel bears an unmistakable stamp of Pauline thought.

But if Mark was a native of Jerusalem, his Gospel as Clement of Alexandria states was composed in Rome, and addressed to a Greco Roman audience. This, in itself, explains a great deal. At the time that Mark’s Gospel was composed, Judaea was, or had recently been, in open revolt, and thousands of

Jews were being crucified for rebellion against the Roman regime. If Mark wished his Gospel to survive and impress itself on a Roman audience, he could not possibly present Jesus as anti-Roman. Indeed, he could not feasibly present Jesus as politically oriented at all. In order to ensure the survival of his message, he would have been obliged to exonerate the

Romans of all guilt for Jesus’s death to whitewash the existing and entrenched regime and blame the death of the Messiah on certain Jews.

This device was adopted not only by the authors of the other Gospels, but by the early Christian Church as well. Without such a device neither Gospels nor