JESUS STORY CONTINUES:

A SEGMENT IN

“SEARCH FOR THE REAL PARENTS OF MY SOUL”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 7, 2015

The thing to be known does not itself begin to be when we get knowledge of it; it is only for us that our knowledge makes it begin.  Let us then lay hold on this beginning, and make or way thither with all speed.

HERMES, Walter Scott, Volume IV, p 9, 1936

NOTE: As we tell the Jesus story and the birth of Christianity, against a Hellenistic tradition in Judaism, it is significant the role that Hermes plays, and the reason for the quotation.

THE GREEK HERMES

There are few names to which more diverse persons lay claim than the term "Hermetic." Alchemists ancient and contemporary apply the adjective "Hermetic" to their art, while magicians attach the name to their ceremonies of evocation and invocation. Followers of Meister Eckhart, Paracelsus, and Jacob Boehme attach the word "Hermetic" to their activities.

Who, then, was Hermes, and what may be said of the philosophy or religion that is connected with him? The early twentieth-century scholar Walter Scott writes of a legend preserved by the Renaissance writer Vergicius:

They say that this Hermes left his own country and traveled all over the world…; and that he tried to teach men to revere and worship one God alone, …the begetter of all things; …and that he lived a very wise and pious life, occupied in intellectual contemplation…, and giving no heed to the gross things of the material world…; and that having returned to his own country, he wrote at the time many books of mystical theology and philosophy.

The early Christian Fathers, in time, mostly held that Hermes was a great sage who lived before Moses and that he was a pious and wise man who received revelations from God that were later fully explained by Christianity. None mentioned that he was a Greek god.

The British scholar R.F. Willetts wrote that "in many ways, Hermes is the most sympathetic, the most baffling, the most confusing, the most complex, and therefore the most Greek of all the Olympian gods."2 If Hermes is the god of the mind, then these qualities appear in an even more meaningful light. For is the mind not the most baffling, confusing, and at the same time the most beguiling, of all the attributes of life?

The name Hermes appears to have originated in the word for "stone heap" since prehistoric times, consisting of an upright stone surrounded at its base by a heap of smaller stones. Such monuments were used to serve as boundaries or as landmarks for wayfarers.

A mythological connection existed between these simple monuments and the deity named Hermes. When Hermes killed the many-eyed monster Argus, he was brought to trial by the gods. They voted for Hermes' innocence, each casting a vote by throwing a small stone at his feet so that a heap of stones grew up around him.

Hermes became best known as the swift messenger of the gods. Euripides, in his prologue to the play Ion, has Hermes introduce himself as follows:

Atlas, who wears on back of bronze the ancient

Abode of the gods in heaven, had a daughter

Whose name was Maia, born of a goddess:

She lay with Zeus, and bore me, Hermes,

Servant of the immortals.

Hermes is thus of a double origin. His grandfather is Atlas, the demigod who holds up heaven, but Maia, his mother, already has a goddess as her mother, while Hermes' father, Zeus, is of course the highest of the gods. It is tempting to interpret this as saying that from worldly toil (Atlas), with a heavy infusion of divine inspiration, comes forth consciousness, as symbolized by Hermes.

Versatility and mutability are Hermes' most prominent characteristics. His specialties are eloquence and invention.  He is the god of travel and the protector of sacrifices, of commerce and good luck. The common quality in all of these is again consciousness, the agile movement of mind that goes to and fro, joining humans and gods, assisting the exchange of ideas and commercial goods. Consciousness has a shadow side, however: Hermes is also noted for cunning and for fraud, perjury, and theft.

The association of Hermes with theft become evident in the pseudo-Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which tells in great detail how the young god, barely risen from his cradle, carries off some of Apollo's prize oxen. The enraged Apollo denounces Hermes to Zeus but is mollified by the gift of the lyre, which the young Hermes has just invented by placing strings across the shell of a tortoise. That the larcenous trickster god is the one who bestows the instrument of poetry upon Apollo may be a point of some significance. Art is bestowed not by prosaic rectitude, but by the freedom of intuition, a function not bound by earthly rules.

While Hermes is regarded as one of the earliest and most primitive gods of the Greeks, he enjoys so much subsequent prominence that he must be recognized as an archetype devoted to mediating between, and unifying, the opposites. This foreshadows his later role as master magician and alchemist, as he was regarded both in Egypt and in Renaissance Europe.

Christianity is relatively young compared with the source of mankind on earth.  It began only a few seconds ago in that comparison.  No one knows, definitively, how old man is.  That is because we cannot tell precisely when a creature described as human first appeared.  One estimate places the earliest presence of a man like creature on earth about 1,200,000 years ago. 

A being with a conscious brain and supple hands to engineer his way through a hostile environment, and survive its shuddering dangers in his relatively diminutive size, girth and strength, however, may have lived but 500,000 years ago (Latourette 1953).

 THE YOUTH OF CHRISTIANITY

In contrast to these vast reaches of time, there is the less than 2,000 year span of Christianity.  If one accepts the premise set forth in the New Testament that in Christ is the secret of God’s plan for all creation, and that God’s purpose is to “gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth,” then Christianity becomes even more recent by comparison to eternity (Schillebeeckx 1981).

Moreover, when placed in the setting of human civilization, Christianity is still youthful.  Civilization is now regarded as having begun twelve thousand years ago, during the last retreat of the continental ice sheets.  This means that Christianity has been present during only a sixth of that brief span of civilized mankind. 

Add to this the fact that Christianity appeared late in the religious development of mankind.  We need not here take the space to outline the history of religion.  We should note, however, that of all these religious faiths which have had an extensive and enduring geographic spread and impact, Christianity is next to the latest to come to birth.

Animism seems to have antedated civilization.  Polytheisms have been numerous and also are very ancient.  Hinduism in its earlier forms antedates Christianity by more than a thousand years.  Judaism, the parent of Christianity, is many hundreds of years older.  Confucius, the dominant figure in religious ethics that the Occident calls by his name, lived in the sixth and fifth century before Christ.  The years of the founder of Buddhism, although debated, are laced in the same centuries.  Zarathustra, also known as Zoroaster, the creator of the faith which was official in Persia for so long, is of much less certain date, but it seems at least as old as Confucius and the Buddha.  Only Manichaeism and Islam were of later origin than Christianity.  Of these, Manichaeism has perished.  Christianity is therefore the next to the youngest of the great religious systems extant in our day (Latourette, 1953).

COULD CHRISTIANITY BE A TRANSIENT FAITH?

The youth of Christianity may be highly important.  It might mean that as a relatively late phenomenon in the annals of religions it could prove to be transient.  The other major religions have risen, flourished, reached an apex, and then have either entered upon a slow decline or have become somewhat stationary.

Hinduism is not as widely practiced outside of certain regions of India; nor has Buddhism registered important gains outside the Orient, that is, if the current Eastern religious trend in the West is considered faddish.  Confucianism has achieve no great geographic advances for centuries beyond China, Mongolia and Japan.   Islam, on the other hand, has made modest to impressive strides pushing its frontiers westward into the industrial west, as well as in North Africa and including south of the Sahara.

It might be argued that Christianity is to have a similar fate to these other religions.  The fact of its youth may seem that for it the cycle of growth, maturity, and decline has not yet reached this advanced stage, but some would argue otherwise.

The grouping of so many high religions in this comparatively brief span of thirteen centuries may be a harbinger of things to come where religion transmogrifies to something else, something more prehensile, something more transparent if not more concrete.  Religions have followed man’s development and needs, and not the other way around.

The fact of their emergence in one segment of time followed by their progressive weakening in so many instances might be interpreted as an indication that all religions in the accepted use of the term are a waning force in the life of mankind (Latourett, 1953).  The decline in the active practice of Christianity in the United States and Europe, alone, might well appear to foreshadow the demise of Christianity entirely (Nietzsche, 1961).

EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY

Given these pessimistic prospects, a contrary view is that religious faith may not be far from the beginning of its history.  For these advocates, religious faith has displayed amazing resilience to challenges from inside and outside, notably evident in clashes of the faithful with zealots on the fringe of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.   

As the twentieth century advanced to its nadir, despite violent clashes and severe loses of life and treasure of these faiths due to these challenges, people became more deep rooted in their beliefs than ever before (Latourette, 1958). 

These three major religions have been more widely influential in the affairs of man than any other religious systems of the past known to mankind (Weber, 1958).  The weight of evidence appears to be on the side of those who maintain that Christianity, in particular, is still in the first flush of its history.   Is this utopianism?  No, Christian believers argue, this is not utopianism but striking optimism in contrast to the panic displayed elsewhere.  Possible clues to the uniqueness of Christianity, its viability and survival, although potentially problematic for any human system, are available to the reader’s discretion in this narrative review.

DAILY LIFE IN THE TIME OF JESUS

If Christianity is only near the beginning of its history it may mean that the forms with which it has developed, whether institutional, intellectual, or ritual, are transitory or of a fluid nature and not to be considered reified.   Since Christianity may be changing before our very eyes, it might be well to examine the soil from which it has risen.

The cultural region from which Christianity has arisen, that of the Mediterranean Basin, was only one of a number of contemporary centers of civilization, and comprised only a fraction of the known world’s population.  This is important to note if we are to see the faith in its true perspective.

Over the previous four and a half centuries, the Occident and its culture became progressively more dominant.  Christianity was born during the reign of the Roman Empire.  East of the Roman Empire was the Persian Empire which for centuries fought Rome to a stalemate.  Once Christianity was born, Persian rulers regarded Christianity with a hostile eye.  This hostility has continued into the twenty-first century.

When we come to the fertile valley in which Christianity began, we see in that geographically circumscribed region that the roots from it sprang were modest.  There was no hint or promise of an auspicious future for the faith. 

It is one of the commonplaces of the Jesus story that Christianity was an outgrowth of the religion of Israel, and the DNA of the Israelis culture is, indeed, apparent in the faith to this day.  Denial of this fact has led to great misunderstandings and regrettable insanities, including the Holocaust of Nazi German and the Jewish pogroms of Soviet Russia in World War Two.  

Israel, in the golden age of history, was never very important politically, then or now, but subsequently psychologically and economically to represent a hegemony without borders. 

Only for a brief time, under David and Solomon, between 900 and 1,000 years before Christ, did Israel achieve a domain of considerable dimensions.  Even then, it did not rank with the major empires of history.

That realm soon broke up into two small states, the Northern and Southern Kingdom, insignificant pawns in contests with the dominant powers in the valley of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. 

Except what came through its religion, Israel and its culture was of slight significance in the region.  In contrast to its neighbors in Mesopotamia and Egypt, it occupied only an infertile area in the Palestinian uplands.  Its cities were small and its architecture unimpressive.  Its art were of no special distinction. 

Today, the monuments of the ruins of Egypt, Nineveh, Babylon, and Syria dwarf those of Israel’s past to the point of embarrassment.  These remnants make clear the relative insignificance from a political and commercial standpoint of the land in which the Christ-child was to take seed (O’Brien: Daniel-Rops, 1962).  

In every respect, Christianity was a striking contrast to those faiths that would become its chief rivals.  The polytheisms had the support of old and politically powerful cultures and the statistics for corroboration.  Zoroastrianism was associated with Persia, which for centuries was one of the mightiest empires in the world.   Buddhism was also a native of India and early won wide popularity.  Confucianism was secure and integrated within the vast region that was China.  Islam early on brought unity to the Arabs, and within a century was supported by one of the three largest and strongest empires of the day, Persia. 

At the outset, Christianity had no such associations and showed little promise of survival.  Not until after three centuries of struggle, often enduring ubiquitous persecution and constant setbacks, did Christianity attain a patron and sponsor of the most amazing kind, the Emperor Constantine of the Roman Empire.  He is alleged to have been converted to the Christian faith on the battlefield.   This allegiance proved of more significance culturally and politically than any other faith before in history (Moore, 1913).

The Battle of the Milvian Bridge took place between the Roman Emperors Constantine I and Maxentius on October 28, 312. It takes its name from the Milvian Bridge, an important route over the Tiber River. Constantine won the battle and started on the path that led him to end the Tetrarchy and become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Maxentius drowned in the Tiber during the battle.

According to chroniclers such as Eusebius of Caesarea and Lactantius, the battle marked the beginning of Constantine's conversion to Christianity. Eusebius of Caesarea recounts that Constantine and his soldiers had a vision of the Christian God promising victory if they daubed the sign of the Chi-Rho, the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek, on their shields. The Arch of Constantine, erected in celebration of the victory, certainly attributes Constantine's success to divine intervention.  The monument, however, does not display any overtly Christian symbolism.

No matter from which vantage point it is observed, the religious development that issued out of Palestine in Judaism and Christianity was of minor significance.  Moreover, the prophetic monotheism, which was the source of Judaism and subsequently Christianity, commanded the support of only a very small proportion of Israel.  All we know is that it was sufficient in numbers to hand down the writings of the prophets, and through them came the main contributions of Israel to the world.

Max Weber might define this phenomenon as “religious ideas and secular ethics.”  In any case, within this minority, we find the direct antecedents of Christianity.   As we have examined in an earlier section, the majority of Israelis either rejected the prophets outright, or devitalized their message by compromise or substitutions of their own.

Christian have seen in this Jesus story the fashion in which God works.  They have believed that God has been seeking man and has been confronting man with Himself and with the standards with which He has set for man.

Yet man, as history has shown, persistently rebels against God and becomes corrupt, lost or disillusioned.  God in His mercy and love, as the Jesus story insists, has fashioned a route to man’s redemption.  God has not done this in the way in which man would have predicted.  Even those whom men have accorded the distinction of being wise have been blinded by sin, especially pride and hubris that they could not clearly see or hear God’s message.  For reasons known only to God Himself, then, so Christians have maintained, God chose to send His Son, Jesus, as His channel for man’s salvation, not to an Empire or a dominant people, but to a small and insignificant minority among the people of Israel, themselves of slight consequence in the family of man. 

As the story unfolds, the culmination of His revelation of Himself, and His redemption of man, Jesus was sent to this humble minority heir as the chosen people upon which to lay the foundation and build a Christian centered faith.

These interpretations arising from Christian faith might be suspect as bias.  Yet, without them, the facts of Christianity would be unintelligible for the researcher (LaTourette, 1953).

JERUSALEM: “CUP OF TREMBLING, 
BURDENSOME STONE”!

Worker in Nazareth, time of Jesus 

To gain some perspective, we must return to ancient Jerusalem.  Just how important was Jerusalem in the beginning of biblical history?  Well, as we have seen, it was not very important at all.  For the first 2,000 years of its 3,000 year history, the Bible fails to mention the site.  Only in the time of Abraham do we begin to hear of Jerusalem. 

It was at Salem, the later Jerusalem, that Abraham met the priest-king, Melchizedek.  A few years later, we find Abraham in Jerusalem taking his son Isaac to the mountains to sacrifice him.

[Profile of Jerusalem in the time of Solomon is here as suggested by Josephus.  Some kind of causeway or bridge probably served to connect the citadel of Zion with the Temple Mount.  In the second century B.C.  Simon the Priest has Mount Zion cut down in order to prevent its use as a hostile bastion from which to threaten the Temple.  The work took three years to level.]

Later traditions imagined that Jerusalem was the district where the “Garden of Eden” was placed, and that Adam and Eve were buried there (other traditions place their burial in Hebron several miles to the South), which indicates quite clearly how real the traditional stories became factual to the people.

Jerusalem finally comes on the biblical scene in an important way in the time of Joshua.  The city had become a Canaanite stronghold called Jebus (Joshua 15.8).  Of all the Canaanite cities that Joshua and the Israelites were commanded to take, Jebus was the most formidable. 

The Jebusites had built a towering fortress on one of the steeper hills.  The area was so strongly fortified that the Israelites failed to capture it until the time of King David.

When David came to power, he found this fortress a source of embarrassment.  While Israel had been able to extend its influence from the River of Euphrates to the River Nile, no one had been able to rout the Canaanites from the stronghold of Jebus (It was located like East Berlin when the Berlin Wall separated it from West Berlin during the Cold War after WWII) right in the heart of Israel’s home territory.  This humiliating spectacle became an intolerable situation to David.  To resolve the problem, he commanded a full-scale attack on the fortress.

Once David had secured the fortress, he adopted it as his capital city, naming it the “City of David.”  He also called it ZION (a city resembling the impenetrable fortress of God in the heavens).  The ARK of GOD was transported to the Citadel.  David, alas, felt secure.

This mountain of the Citadel was situated south of what was to become the TEMPLE MOUNT.  When Solomon finally completed the building of the Temple on the knoll just to the north of ZION (City of David), he removed the ARK OF GOD from ZION and put it in the Temple.  Because of this move of the Ark to the northern knoll of the ridge, the whole mountain ridge became known, symbolically, as ZION.

After the time of Solomon, Jerusalem remained essentially the same for 400 years.  Nothing happened of any major consequence until the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon.  In his wars with the Jews in the sixth century B.C., he so utterly destroyed Jerusalem that the area looked like open fields where once there had been a city (Micheas 3:12).  Indeed, the destruction of Nebuchadnezzar was so thorough that very little remained of David’s and Solomon’s Jerusalem.

Then after seventy years of complete desolation, some 50,000 Jews returned from Babylon to Jerusalem to rebuild the ruined city.  They found the topography much the same as it had been in pre-exile days, but the site of the city was in shambles.  Soon, however, a New Jerusalem was being built.  During the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, the city was completed.

This was Jerusalem of a difference.  It had none of the former splendor that graced the city of David and Solomon.  This simply was not possible.  The Jews of Jerusalem were a mere remnant of a scattered tribe, and had little power or money to recapture the majesty of the former city.  Still, though Jerusalem was smaller and more modest, it had become a living city again.

For 300 years, from the time of Nehemiah to the Maccabean Wars (the middle of the second century B.C.), there were no essential changes.  But with the Maccabees, some very definitive alterations were to evolve.

The Maccabean Wars developed as a result of the Syrians conquering and taking over most of Judea.  A resistance movement emerged that vanquished Syrians from Judea.  The victory, however, was not a complete one.  The Citadel of Jerusalem still remained in Syrian hands.  Just as earlier, when the Jebusites took control of the city, which had proven an embarrassment to David, so Simon (the last of the Maccabee brothers) experienced the same humiliation at the hands of the Syrians.

While Simon had carved an independent Jewish state out of Palestine, his enemies were still firmly in control in the Citadel of ZION.  The embarrassment did not last long.  The fortress was finally starved into surrendering.  Once more, the main Citadel of Jerusalem was again in Jewish hands.

This time a decision was reached by the inhabitants of Jerusalem that profoundly altered the topography of central Jerusalem.  Instead of continuing the use of the Citadel, as Josephus the historian informs us, the people of Israel decided to tear down its walls, its buildings, and to cut down the very mountain itself. 

This was to prevent the Gentiles from recapturing the citadel and harassing the future population of this city.  Next, the people of Israel went to work on cutting down the mountain.  This undertaking was so gigantic that it took the population, working night and day, three years to accomplish (Josephus, 1911).

Josephus states that this mountain being demolished was located in the Lower Quarter of the Old City, which was the ZION of David’s time (Josephus 1908).  This explains why the Bible calls the fortress “Mount Zion.”  It also renders more understandable why there is no longer a “Mount Zion” on the ridge south of the Temple Mount.

Perhaps not surprising, some scholars feel Josephus, while right in telling about the destruction of the mountain, is clearly wrong in identifying it with the City of David.  The main reason for their doubt is Josephus’s claim that from this citadel one could look down into the Temple enclosure (Josephus 1911).   

If the fortress were situated on the spur south of the Temple Mount, scholars claim, it would have had to be a very tall mountain, indeed, to view the Temple enclosure.  But that is where Josephus puts it and the historical “Book of Maccabees” implies the same thing (I Machabee 1:33-34; 14:36). 

Not to belabor the point, but such is the fabric of this period, confusing and sometimes confounding.  After all, it might be said it took the population of Jerusalem three years to demolish the mountain, suggesting the mountain had to have been of some size.

PLEASE NOTE:

Next, “ENTER HEROD, BUILDER EXTRAORDINARY!”