Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (2 page)

In the Middle Ages, the community of Jews crossed the river to the huddled quarter that is still called the Ghetto; and from the slopes of the Janiculum there are fine views of the silvery Synagogue, built at the beginning of this century near the site of its several, much smaller predecessors, the four corners
of its dome giving it a curiously Asian appearance and distinguishing it from all the other domes of Rome. During the Middle Ages, the Jews, protected by popes who valued their services, fared better in Italy than in other European countries, though they were subject to punitive taxes and, as early as the thirteenth century, were made to wear a yellow
O
, precursor of horrors to come. Then the retrograde and, at times, paranoid
papacy of the early modern period began to insist on marginalizing the Jews in new ways. Locked by night within the Ghetto by order of Paul IV in the sixteenth century, they were dragooned by subsequent popes into listening to Christian sermons and giving up all trades save moneylending, scrap metal, and rag. Forced to be objects of ridicule during carnivals and papal processions, they were periodically barred from owning land or practicing any profession (though they had once been physicians to the popes) and at last banned from any role in public life. Their fellow Romans, however, more
simpatici
than popes generally are, tended to be fond of their Jewish neighbors and to count them as friends and fellow citizens. It is, therefore, considered a terrible blot on the Roman character that the Nazis were able, during their occupation of the city, to round up the Jews of Rome en masse and deport them to Auschwitz on the fateful
16 ottobre 1943
, a date most Romans have committed to memory and which occurred less than a hundred years after Garibaldi’s Battalion of Hope had, by its youthful deaths on the
Janiculum, won belated freedom and civil rights for all the citizens of Rome.

Shades of my own ancestors haunt the prospect from the Janiculum. Looking out across the valley in the hour before dawn, I can imagine there appearing on the northeast horizon bands of naked, mustachioed Celts, the locks of their lime-washed
hair standing up on their heads, an “immense host, covering miles of ground with its straggling masses of horse and foot,” as the Roman historian Livy described them. Early in the fourth century
B.C.
they rode their horses into a much smaller Rome, causing panic and flight among the inhabitants. “The air,” wrote Livy, “was loud with the dreadful din of the fierce war-songs and discordant shout of a people whose very life is wild adventure.” All who did not flee before the marauders hid themselves within the fortifications of the Capitoline Hill, save for the elderly, who could not climb and were slaughtered on their thresholds. Then, waiting for the dead of night, the barbarians almost made it up the Capitoline itself, climbing the stones that face the hill on one another’s shoulders in an eerie silence no one thought them capable of. But at the last moment, just when the first of the invaders had reached the summit, the geese of the Capitoline, sacred to Juno whose temple stood on the heights, honked their frantic warnings, and the Celts were cut down. If I could examine the genetic cells of these fierce warriors, I could establish kinship.

I can claim even closer kinship with the Irish noblemen Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, prince of Tyrconnel, who lie buried beneath the flagstones of San Pietro in Montorio on the east side of the Janiculum. They fought against impossible odds and almost succeeded in expelling the English occupiers from “Elizabethan” Ireland. Was the prototype of “Tyrconnel’s dread war cry,
‘O’Donnell Abu!,’ ”
which rang out in Ireland against the soldiers of Elizabeth I, heard first in the Western world at the gates of Rome on that faraway morning in 390
B.C.
?

Beneath the square cobblestones of the Janiculum, who knows whose history remains to be recovered?

.  .  .

T
HE
HISTORY
OF
THE
WORLD
, like the history of its hills, is written in blood, the blood of barbaric warriors and bold partisans, of old women and beardless boys, of the guilty and the innocent. And what is the “desire of the everlasting hills”? What could be the meaning of this phrase, taken from the blessing of
Jacob on his son Joseph, the last of the patriarchs? Is not the desire of the everlasting hills that they be saved from their everlastingness, that something new happen, that the everlasting cycle of human cruelty, of man’s inhumanity to man, be brought to an end?

Two thousand years ago a man was born into a family of carpenters in occupied
Palestine. He was a small-town Jew, born in a bad time for Jews. Their land was no longer their own, and they had been made to bow before a succession of conquerors who had diluted their proud culture and, as many would have said, infected it. His name, as everyone knows, was Jesus of Nazareth—or, as the Jews of his own day called him, Yeshua. As everyone knows, he preached a message of mercy, love, and peace and was crucified for his trouble. This unlikely character has long been accounted the central figure of Western civilization. Even now, as we cross to the beginning of the third millennium since his birth, we count our days by his appearance on earth; and, though our supposedly post-Christian society often ignores and even ridicules him, there are no serious suggestions for replacing him as the Icon of the West.

But this book is part of a series on cultural impact. And the great question about Jesus must always be: Did he make a difference? Is our world—in the century that began with the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, reached its nadir with
the “scientific” holocaust of six million Jews (and five million others), not to speak of the slaughter by their own governments of Russians and Chinese in the scores of millions, and now comes to its end with genocides in central Africa and “ethnic cleansings” in the Balkans that are still, horribly enough, “in progress”—is our world any better than the one inhabited by the Celts and Romans of twenty-four centuries ago? Did the values preached by Jesus influence the Anglican Queen Elizabeth or her opponent the Catholic Earl O’Neill? Did she ever shudder at the carnage of her battlefields? Did he, even once, as he surveyed the hacked limbs, the gouged eyes, the grisly dying, wonder if there was another way? Do Christian values have any influence on the actions of Christians who on both sides of the English/Irish divide have continued to “fight the old fight again”? Did the life and death of Jesus make any difference to the denizens of first-century Trans Tiberim? Does he make any difference to the residents of today’s Trastevere?

These are hard questions; some will no doubt label them unfair. But they must be posed at the outset. For if this Jesus, this figure professedly central to our whole culture, has had no effect, he has no place in a history of cultural effects. In the pages that follow, we will look at the phenomenon of Jesus, as experienced by those who knew him best and by the first generations of his followers, who in their surviving traditions, both oral and written, bring us as close as we can get to this often elusive historical figure. When our investigation is completed, we will pose the hard questions again.

But in order to understand Jesus we must begin before his time and strive to appreciate how the world he was born into came to be.

T
HE
A
XIAL
A
GE
was over. It had lasted three hundred years—from the late seventh century
B.C.
to the late fourth—a very long time. In Confucian China, it had seen the burgeoning of reasonableness and courtly moderation, as well as the mystical depths uncovered by the Tao of
Lao-Tsu. In India, the great age had produced the ineffable example of Gautama Buddha, reforming the chaos of more ancient systems and revealing the steps to personal peace. In Iran, the priest
Zarathustra had spoken to the Persians, who carried the fire ceremony and the Zoroastrian vision of a cosmic battle between good and evil beyond the borders of Mesopotamia, situated between the legendary Tigris and Euphrates in the fertile delta where civilization had first shown itself. Just west of Mesopotamia, in the tiny, unstable kingdoms of
Israel and
Judah, the Hebrew prophets rose, giving to the bizarre
monotheism of their singular people an ethical foundation so profound that the Jews could never entirely forsake it. In the isles and peninsulas of
Greece, the
Axial Age saw the flowering of what would come to be called “philosophy”—love of wisdom for its own sake—and of a noble “politics” (another Greek term) that took the name “
democracy.” This same time and place saw the invention of drama and its division into “tragedy” and “comedy” in a theater that has never been equaled, as well as the first attempts to write what the Greeks called “history.”

These distinct developments within the limits of these ancient
cultures certainly showed similarities to one another. In the words of Arnaldo Momigliano, the most learned and nimble interpreter of antiquity in our age: “All these civilizations display literacy, a complex political organization combining central government and local authorities, elaborate town-planning, advanced metal technology and the practice of international diplomacy. In all these civilizations there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual movements. Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation of things. New models of reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models.”

But these cultural developments proceeded in parallel. They never intersected, never influenced one another save in the most marginal ways, so that the world we find as the curtain rises on the third century
B.C.
is still a world of separate societies, each enclosed by its own characteristic language and values, each with its own Golden Age to look back on, populated by its own heroes. In the mind of a third-century Athenian, the philosophers
Socrates and
Plato, the dramatists
Sophocles and Euripides, the political leader Pericles, the sculptor Phidias, and the historian
Herodotus lived still, and he, living in a lesser age, bore these standards of excellence within him for reference and judgment. He knew nothing of
Abraham and
Moses,
David and
Isaiah,
Jeremiah and
Ezekiel, the figures who lived in the mind of every inhabitant of third-century
Jerusalem, just a few nautical miles east across the Mediterranean. But as early as the late fourth century, this cultural exclusiveness was beginning to dissolve; and by the time of Jesus the better part of the ancient world—from Asia Minor
to the Atlantic, from North Africa to the edges of the frosty forests that concealed the northern barbarians—had been soldered together by forces so strong that, with only a few notable breaks, the cultural unity has held ever since.

A
LEXANDER
THE
G
REAT
, the man who would make all the difference, was born in July of 356
B.C.
, son of Philip II, king of the Greek outpost of Macedon, and a mother who was determined that her child would grow up to be greater than his father. During Alexander’s childhood, Philip’s ambition made Macedon feared; and he gradually extended its power south into the Greek peninsulas and east through the Balkans, creating a sort of “greater Greece,” a unity of politics, language, and culture, where Philip was overlord, the Greek gods were given uniform worship, and Greek culture heroes from Socrates to Herodotus were held in high esteem.

His father’s aggressions frightened the child Alexander, but for one reason only: “There will be nothing left for me to conquer,” pouted the prince, when news of his progenitor’s sensational victories was brought to him. While still a teenager, Alexander successfully acted as regent in his father’s absence and at eighteen was given command of the left wing of the Macedonian cavalry at the
battle of Chaeronea, which, thanks largely to Alexander’s brilliant performance, smashed the combined might of the Greek city-states of
Athens, principal city of mainland Greece, and
Thebes, chief city of Boeotia and Oedipus’s legendary capital. If Chaeronea was decisive for world history, it was also decisive for Alexander’s destiny: ever after he was seen as unstoppable. This beautiful boy of the “melting eye,” who modestly inclined his head to one side, had
overcome the strength of the Athenian federation, even to the extent of crushing the mystical might of the Sacred Band of
Thebes, a supposedly invincible posse of superheroes.