Part I: context is everything.
It’s a fact that in every Holy Week History and Religion meet. It’s what they have to say to one another that is a matter of opinion….
We are apt to think of History as being composed of hard facts. It may be. It may not be. It also may be composed of reasoned arguments whose general acceptance bestows on opinion the authority of hard fact. The earth being held to be flat or the earth being held to be the centre of the Universe are obvious examples of unchallenged suppositions being thus accepted.
The past being a country without clear signposts often means facts are too few to depend upon. History also teaches that the sources that survive Time’s tests may not tell the whole story. It’s the job of the historian to piece together a narrative on the basis of the truth gleaned from the sources which he or she has to hand. Sometimes, there is so much information the historian’s job is rather to select salient facts in order to compose a coherent narrative. Sometimes the available sources are literary and allusive and rather eschew chronology and verifiable detail. Either way it is always for an historian to assess what the evidence tells; to gauge how reliable it is and, to consider the perspective from which it views events.
Thus, for example, the same dull facts say, of Ireland’s history in 1916, may from an Irish nationalist and an Irish unionist perspective tell a very different story. The history of the Reformation provides an even better example of how narrative and events may be evaluated quite differently by those who hold opposing confessional perspectives. And indeed the great narratives of national history composed in the nineteenth century took pride in openly taking the side of what were perceived then to be History’s winning argument in favour of nation states and their Empires. Later in the social rubble of two world wars the political classes of the winning West looked ever more hopefully to government and central planning which had in so many eyes delivered victory.
Within the churn of the cold war historians’ analyses reflected on these nearer outcomes. The fashion came and went for Marxist history with its vortex of revolutions here, there and everywhere. The Inevitable was in fashion. Then neoconservative historians who, from Sir Lewis Namier down, looked to economic models and sociopolitical structures thought institutions’ histories might better explain matters. One might think these two stands were co-joined in the unlikely person of Sir Geoffrey Elton and his Tudor Revolution in Government, a tormented tale of betrayal and misunderstanding piled upon betrayal with the ultimate of nihilist anti-heroes, Thomas Cromwell, carving out a plain future in the Kafaesque landscape of Henry VIII’s England – a dark place which in Elton’s account somehow feels closer to the imagined world of Gormenghast than to the flashy realities of the Tudor court.
It is no accident that the myth of Protestantism as being synonymous with liberty, liberal economic progress and parliamentary democracy – all to be taken as good things of themselves – and resulting from the English Reformation – was widely accepted as true within the British Empire(s) – but never travelled much beyond history as known to the English speaking peoples. And even then there were troublesome dissenters – such as the Irish.
These problems of interpretative fashion, evidence and the availability of sources have always multiplied the further back in time the historian travels. In the case decades around Christianity’s birth the sources become ever more scarce. Moreover, the eyes of the intellectual and literary Roman commentariat were hardly fixed upon the events in a particular week in a backwater of Empire around 30 AD. The execution of an unknown Galilean hardly figured much in any account of the important events inside the political sphere of the Pax Romana in the times of Augustus,Tiberius, Claudius and Nero. Josephus – the Romano-Jewish commentator – was himself shaped much more by the events of the First and Second Jewish Wars – the latter of which ended with the total destruction of the Temple and the diaspora of the Jews across the Empire.
Yet by the fourth century AD these anonymous events that took place in or around the city of Jerusalem in that single week had changed history – both from the perspective of historians and from those of the facts that subsequently came to be generally accepted as true. Gospel truth was in consequence for the millennium and a half after Constantine the only measure of truth that mattered to even the most nominal of Christians and the peoples of Christendom.
Why should this all still matter today? It matters not only because it once changed the history of the world but because – whether or not you believe in this person, Jesus – what he was, or who he was, or who he wasn’t or who he isn’t, today those events still define much of what happens in the world in which we live.
The events of that single week, the week we still call Holy Week yet casts a giant shadow over our world – secular and religious.
So what actually happened?
Here undisputed and verifiable facts are scarce but probably we can accept that at the end of that first Holy Week a Jewish ‘rabbi’ or ‘teacher’ – by inference this man was therefore one of the intellectual (religious) class of Jewish society which at the time also included the distinct elements known as Pharisees, Scribes and Priests – this man was crucified outside the city on the eve of Passover. His name was Jesus. He is generally referred to as Galilean but later his origins were to be traced back to Bethlehem in Judea – home of King David.
That this man was put to death was not of itself shocking – though the Roman means used to execute a Jewish ‘rabbi’ or ‘prophet’ on this particular day was from the outset seen as a deliberate ritual profanation of his Jewishness and itself was destined to become a sign of the momentous nature of the events.
By the time of his death Jesus was one amongst a fair number such religious figures who had thrived in the culture of the Late Herodian or Late Second Temple Era – amongst whose we can also count interestingly and famously the person of John the Baptist. These religious preachers and teachers were all men. They were drawn from an evangelical or prophetic tradition in Judaism. It was a tradition that had long been in conflict with the Temple elites with its priesthood and its rituals – elites that included the exclusive priests of Levi but was increasingly dominated in this later period by the Pharisees and Scribes who were dominant in the synagogues and owed their own prominence to a renewed emphasis on ritual observance of the Mosaic law that had followed the profanation of the Temple which led to the revolt of the Maccabees and helter skleter Roman domination.
These counter-cultural rabbis or teachers represented a Messianic or charismatic element in Jewish religion – a type of Jewish religious leader that can be traced all the way back to the Prophets who, following the Exodus period dominated by the figure of Moses, were deeply influential in the religion and politics of the old Kingdom of Israel – at least until the end of the Babylonian captivity – and included figures such as Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah(s), Jeremiah and Daniel.
Many of these popular preachers of the last century before the destruction of the Jewish Temple were cult figures – healers and ascetics – and they often attracted large followings. Equally, they often aroused deep distrust amongst the Jewish religious elite – legists, Pharisees, Scribes, Sadducees, Essenes and rabbis and the Temple priests – who dominated the ordered hierarchy of Jewish society. Many such quasi-messianic Jewish figures were stoned to death or otherwise driven from their homes or executed for their beliefs. No one could accuse the Judaism of the Late Temple period of being unduly burdened by a desire for heterodox tolerance.
The man at the centre of this particular storm is known to us as Jesus Christ – the latter name means the anointed one – the former, Jesus, is a popular derivative of Joshua – meaning He Delivers or Deliverer. Jesus himself most often described himself as the Son of Man – a phrase often used by Jewish charismatics in the time of the Prophets. By the time of the Council of Nicaea (326 AD) this Jesus is formally proclaimed to be the Son of God. Though we have glimpses of him from other Jewish writers like Josephus and Philo of Alexandria – most of what we know is found in the letters of Saint Paul ( who himself never met Jesus before his spiritual encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus) and the four different accounts of his life – all written at least a generation after the events themselves – and which we know as the Gospels.
None of these letters or accounts of the life of Jesus were written as straightforward narrative of events. The synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – although written in a chronological sequence – are not simply written as chronological narrative. These rather are written – as the writers themselves attest throughout – as an inspired reflection upon events whose importance only became apparent to the witnesses to them ex post facto, that is after the events of the first Holy Week and Easter. These witnesses clearly included the apostles, some disciples and unusually and prominently the holy women – who are principally Mary the mother of Jesus, (Martha) and Mary the sisters of Lazarus, Mary of Cleophas, the mother of St James the less and Mary Magdalene. Martha is not accounted as one of the women witnessing the passion and crucifixion.
The gospels are believed to be, like St Paul’s conversion himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit. This does not mean they are not faithful records of what was remembered by the Apostles and the other followers of Jesus. Clearly, those who witnessed the events of that seven days – from the triumphant entry into Jerusalem through the betrayal, trial, passion, death and then most surprisingly the empty tomb – which they subsequently stated betokened the Resurrection – have too much in the way of circumstantial detail and traumatic recall not to resemble true personal experiences. In this respect as literature they are quite unusual in the ancient world.
There were various versions of these gospels in circulation amongst the fledgling Christian communities for decades before a final version of the gospel emerged. Each of them seems to have been written for specific audiences – Mathew for example primarily to a Jewish audience and Luke to a non-Jewish readership. Mark’s account – traditionally held to have been inspired directly by St Peter – has no Nativity or other prologue and contains very few of the parables. Nor is there much of the extended extempore teachings of Jesus included within Mark’s narrative. Mark is driven by a single urgent preoccupation of Jesus – repentance – and that the kingdom of God was near at hand. John’s gospel – the last of the four gospels – is the richest in allusive language. It was composed early in the second century. Whether it was written by St John (the Beloved Apostle) is hotly disputed but it probably was at least composed by his disciples in or around the church he founded in the Greek speaking coastal region around the city of Ephesus.
This last gospel was written in the shadow of the destruction of the Second Temple and the diaspora. The re-emergent Jewish communities turned to the synagogue and increasingly frowned upon the heterodoxy of the Jesus cult. At this time many Christians were being expelled from Jewish communities and were having to forge a new a cultural and religious worship of their own. They naturally perceived the events of Holy Week in the persecuting light of this renewed rabbinical or Pharisaical Jewish religious puritanism which was driving Christians out of their Jewish communities.This led in the second century to an increasingly different analysis of the events of the life of Jesus, his teachings, and most emphatically his death and his resurrection. This is not to say his Resurrection was not believed from the outset – it was – but rather its cultist and theosophical significance was altered by the reaction of the Jews of the diaspora to their Christian confreres.
Thus, a particular reading of the gospels might later give rise to and justification for the antisemitism of Christian Europe from the latter days of the Roman Empire onward to today partly because the gospels over time lost their context of mutual exclusion and the serial persecutions and expulsions of Christians from synagogue. Similarly, it also explains why the prophecy of Jesus about the destruction of the Second Temple is so important in the gospel narratives whereas to modern Christians that historical event seems to own little or no significance. However, amid his urgent preaching of a new kingdom, Jesus himself predicted, if the gospels reflect his teaching, not only the event of the Temple’s destruction but that its physical destruction would be to offer a decisive moment of choice between the old and new covenants.
The Jewish communities post diaspora had to re-found a religion no longer focused on Temple and its ritual pilgrimages for the great feasts of Passover, Shavuot or Pentecost ( festival of giving of the Torah), the feast Tabernacles, and the Festival of Lights (Hanukkah). Instead they turned towards the close observances of the old dispensation – the laws of Moses, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, synagogue and keeping Sabbath in community. In this they increasingly relied on the Pharisees and Scribes who populated the diaspora and helped to re-imagine Judaism in it a new rabbinical form.
Those who followed the new covenant inspired by Jesus saw in their lifetimes all Jesus had predicted come to pass so spectacularly and enduring their own suffering consequent on their separation from their Jewish religious community through expulsion by the same Pharisees that betrayed the Lord, shaped their view of these events. The Christians saw a clear prophetic parallel between those who had rejected Christ rejecting afresh his followers in the aftermath of what appeared to be a devastating and definitive second judgement on the Jewish peoples. They now awaited with fresh expectation the imminent arrival of the third definitive historical event alluded to by Jesus – the coming of the kingdom. Experience and expectation made a particular sense of the written and spoken testaments these fledgling communities came to know but their interpolation dressed rather than camouflaged the principal events.
This not only gave fresh impetus to assembling a record of those momentous lasts years, months and days of Christ’s life, his death and his resurrection but it coloured the emphasis of each gospel’s narrative detail. Yet all four shared the same History. There is a fervour that permeates the gospel accounts and it is obvious even to the modern reader. Yet these more obvious assumptions are not the only assumptions that inform the gospel narratives. It is these that point the historian – as opposed to the theologian – towards understanding the melding of actual events of that Holy Week from long, long ago and a familiar setting redolent of earlier Jewish cultural expectations and experience that informs the gospel story. the first Christians would have understood this cultural context and would have readily seen the story in those terms. These allusive elements are lost to the modern reader and to the general historian.
These are the things that in fact reveal most both about what actually happened but also why early on those who were involved reacted to and saw the events in a particular way. It is this which caught alight in the Jewish and quasi Jewish religious imaginations. It also meant the religious ideas of the historical Jesus in many ways turned out to have a life of their own – even if the agnostic or atheist must refuse to accept they point towards an eternal Life beyond death itself.