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Rome and Jerusalem

2007-03-09T19:39:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I bought a book by Martin Goodman: Rome and Jerusalem - The clash of ancient civilizations. (excerpt below).

What kind of incompatibility between Jews and Romans prevented them coexisting more or less peacefully. Or: what happened?

I like such questions. They never can be answered reductionistically, or through models, only by using your soul and a lot of knowledge.

Rome and Jerusalem

The Clash of Ancient Civilizations
Martin Goodman - Author

£25.00

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Extract from Rome & Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilisations by Martin Goodman

Introduction: The Main Witness

In 70 CE the great city of Jerusalem, one of the most magnificent and renowned of its day, and, for Jews, the centre of all their aspirations, both religious and national, was devastated by Roman forces after a terrible siege. Over the following centuries Jews were pushed to the margins of Roman society. Rome came to be viewed by Jews as the epitome of evil power. Such polarization of two ancient cultures which had previously coexisted amicably was without parallel in the early Roman empire. This book seeks to explain why it occurred, and to examine its consequences to the present.

My original intention when I began to write this history was simply to examine the differences between the Jewish and Roman civiIizations that shaped the world in which the controversial Jewish teacher Jesus lived and Christianity was formed. But it became clear that a static depiction of similarities and contrasts between the two peoples would be misleading. Pervading the history books, both ancient and modern, is an assumption that, because in 70 CE the conflict proved so dreadful, it must have been also inevitable. This interpretation of events, based on hindsight, seemed to me worth questioning. I therefore set out to examine whether the Jews of Jerusalem in the first half of the first century CE felt themselves to be the oppressed subjects of a hostile empire, as Judaean Jews clearly did a hundred years later, when the rebel leader Shimon bar Kosiba (known to later Jewish tradition as Bar Kokhba) led them in a second bloody revolt in 132-5 CE.

Scholars trying to discover the truth about this unhappy story two thousand years ago can make use of a remarkable amount of contemporary evidence. I shall discuss much of that evidence, and why it survives in such quantities, later in this book. But the reader should be introduced from the start to one ancient author whose copious writings will inevitably have more influence than any other on my reconstruction of the history of the Jews in the years immediately preceding 70 CE.

The Jerusalem priest Josephus (37—c. 100 CE) himself wrote an account of these years precisely in order to explain why such a disaster had befallen the Jews. He was in an outstandingly good position to know the answer, since he had himself participated in the war, first as a general on the side of the Jewish rebels and then (after his capture) as an observer inside the Roman headquarters. He composed the seven books of his Jewish War in Rome, as a Roman citizen and an acquaintance of the emperors, within a decade of the end of the conflict.

Josephus was born into the ruling elite of Jerusalem and was much involved in the political intrigues of the city even before war broke out in 66. Just a few years before, in c. 61, he had travelled to Rome to appeal on behalf of some friends who had been sent there as prisoners by the governor of Judaea to render an account to the emperor Nero, and during that visit he had come into contact with the fringes of the imperial court. When he returned to Jerusalem he was caught up in the increasingly turbulent atmosphere and, once war appeared inevitable in October 66, joined the rebel government with responsibility for the defence of Galilee. As a general he was conspicuously unsuccessful and in spring 67 he was captured by Roman forces. According to his own account, he contemplated suicide to avoid falling into Roman hands but, persuaded by divine guidance in nightly dreams that God himself, who had created the Jewish people, had decided to break what he had made, and that a Roman victory was inevitable, he decided willingly to surrender to the Romans, taking God as witness that he was going ‘not as a traitor but as your minister’.

In 69 Josephus’ status as a prestige prisoner in the Roman camp was transformed by the revelation that he had prophesied already in 67, the elevation of Vespasian, the general in command of the campaign in Judaea, to supreme power as emperor in Rome, an inspired prediction of considerable value to Vespasian in his bid for power against rival claiments to the purple. Josephus’ later career depended on this prophecy: in June 69 he was released from his bonds by Vespasian and in due course, when Vespasian was safely installed in the imperial palace in Rome in 70, Josephus was provided with lodgings in the city in the house which Vespasian himself had occupied before he became emperor. Honoured with Roman citizenship and granted a pension, Josephus settled down to write over the next thirty years or so a series of books about the Jews and Judaism, and the relationship of the Jews to the gentile world.

Josephus’ vivid account of the events which led to the catastrophe of 70 CE was thus that of a participant and, in many cases, an eyewitness. He knew the terrain and the personalities of the leaders, and he understood the passions of both sides. But it would be unreasonable to expect him to be objective. He himself warned his readers that he would not try to suppress his private sentiments as he mourned the misfortunes of his native country, and his ability to exaggerate and distort his narrative to make a political or rhetorical point is revealed by some startling discrepancies between some passages in the Jewish War and parallel accounts in two of his later writings: the Jewish Antiquities, which in twenty books covered all of Jewish history from the beginnings of time to the outbreak of the war, and the Life, an autobiography published in 93 CE as a supplement to the Antiquities, in which he endeavoured to exculpate himself for having begun the war as a leader of the rebels.

The whole of Josephus’ narrative is permeated by the ambivalence which inevitably arose from this complex political career, first as defender of Jerusalem, then an apologist for the regime that had destroyed it. He himself claims that his change of sides was inspired by dreams sent from God. Later generations of Jews have been inclined to treat such claims as self-serving, as they undoubtedly were, but even if this judgement is correct, it should not detract from the value of his first-hand testimony, particularly when he is writing for Roman readers who had also witnessed the events he describes and could know when he is fabricating the story. To accept Josephus’ often tendentious evaluation of the motives and characters of the Jews and Romans whose actions constitute his narrative would be rash, but to accept the details of his narrative, particularly when they contradict his own explanations of events, and so survive in the narrative only because they happened, is reasonable. As a result, the story of Jerusalem in the years up to 70 CE can be told in far more depth than that of any other city in the Roman empire at this time, apart from the story of Rome itself.

The God Delusion

2007-03-06T21:38:00.000+01:00

Last week Herma and I were enjoying ourselves in a Waterstones bookshop in London, near Trafalgar square, and there I saw two books about science and religion: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath. I could not leave them there, so they went with me and I have just read the response of Alister McGrath to Richard Dawkins.

Here I want to collect some thoughts that arose while reading both books.

The critique of Alister McGrath is devastating and amounts to: Dawkins is not really competent in dealing with religion as phenomenon, and he does not apply his scientific rigour when dealing with it.

AmcG requests a legitimate and respected place for religion in the human sphere, and Dawkins denies a place with those qualities. AmcG is not a naive believer, he clearly has tried to integrate science into his belief. He was an atheist before becoming a christian. You do not hear him complain about evolution theory, nor promote creationism or even intelligent design, in fact he rejects intelligent design and creationism.

I have not read Dawkins. I now hin from extensive quotes in the book Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett, a fellow traveller of Dawkins. Dennett opposes two approaches of people to the stunning aspects of reality: skyhooks and cranes. A skyhook is a principle by which you can explain certain things, but the skyhook itself remains a mystery, it is hooked unto the sky, it is an act of faith or belief. A crane is a much more mundane way of explaining things, firmly standing on the ground, lifting things to a level at which they can be understood. Cranes stand for the scientific method. Cranes can be stacked, and that way become nearly as powerful as skyhooks. An intermediate crane might look like a skyhook, but still there is always a link with the ground.

To me this sounds intensely good. As soon as you admit skyhooks, the real urge for research is gone. The book of E.J. Dijksterhuis: Mechanizing the World View (de mechanisering van het wereldbeeld) describes the history of physics from the Anticity up to Newton. It is the long story of the wrestle that was going on between observation and theory on the one hand, and religious beliefs on the other. Especially just before Galilei the world was explained by skyhooks, whose authority was not to be questioned. We don't want that ever again was my feeling.

So here is my point of sympathy with Dennett, Dawkins and all rebels against religion.

At the same time I think there is something going on in religion that defies eradication. Like there is in art, social relations, love, inspiration. I do not mean that kind of religion that lives by dogmas and convention. They are fossils left by movements that once represented dynamical forces in society and souls. In fact, the most dynamical human forces you can think of.

The confusing thing is, that religion is always associated with exactly its uninspired forms, and for good reasons, because every living religion sooner or later engenders exactly these forms.

In fact, Dawkins and most professed atheists I know, rebel against the static qualities of religion, but want to preserve the dynamic qualities of the mind.

I have the feeling that Dawkins, using his powers of expression, his wits, and his prominent status as professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, will often put things in such a way that I heartily agree with him.
I also think that I will not change my opinion about religion after reading him.

Let my state quickly my current opinion about religion: religion is not propositionally true, but something of real value for humans is transmitted by it. I do not believe anything to be true just because a religion claims it to be true, I do not believe in any God with definite properties, yet I believe that there are certain values, forces, deeply buried in the human character, that need expression, and that without any expression of them, life would be experienced as meaningless, unhappy, dreadful. I think it is probable that there are beings that transcend our reality in unforeseen ways, but I do not think they are necessarily one and the same, that they are all-powerful, omniscient, or good. It might be that at the end-point of a long chain of transcendence, there is one limiting being, with limiting properties, which you could call God, but it does not seem to me an interesting concept, and I do not think this notion of a God has anything to do with real life religion.

I think an object such as our reality is either the product of non-intelligent forces inside it, or the product of manipulation of intelligent forces outside it. It might be that sooner or later we find test, clues, hunches to decide which is the case.

If the latter is the case, we have little hope to find ultimate theories about reality. Our explanations will never find a natural foundation in elementary principles. This is not a reasons why it can not be the case.

If the former is the case, it remains a mystery why the whole mysterious system with its forces with their potential exists at all. Why should it be there, a lonely system, called reality or universe, not communicating with other realities or universes. What is the use of such a structure? But this is also not an argument that it can not be the case.

I have learned, I have been trained to match structure and function. Where there is structure, I suspect function. Maybe I do that too much. It would be nice to have objective criteria to see how purposeful an object is in its environment. If we can build a science of teleologics, we might apply it to reality as a whole, and get an indication whether the structure of reality corresponds to some sort of function. If that succeeds, you have transcended physical reality.

In some interpretations of quantum theory material objects are regarded as computing devices. Computing is all about structure and function. So, unexpectedly, at the lowest known level of matter, something non-material, non-extensional is turning up, something intensional, something that refers to a conceptual side of reality. What is the origin of this concept-nature of reality? It feels like discovering that our reality is the implementation of software on hardware. The discovery that our space-time is just a set of pixels which have colours, such as mass, electric potential, or whatever. So spacetime is a concept, realized on a machine. So: who has formed the concept, who has built the machine? There is some Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy stuff here. (Dawkins dedicates his book to the memory of Douglas Adams).