RESURRECTION, HOLOCAUST AND DENIAL: A RESPONSE TO 'THE READER'

Blessed are they who have believed and have not seen.

                                                                        John 20:29

 

I believe that Caesar crossed the Rubicon because I have been told so.  But I can’t prove it: I wasn’t there.  Maybe whoever said he did – Suetonius, if I remember right – was lying because of some private agenda.  As far as I know, there are no Roman historians other than Plutarch to confirm the account; but if there were, what if there was a conspiracy and they were all lying?  The existing oldest record of the event is, in any case, only a copy of an original.  With that copy, what about scribal intervention, redactorial interpretation etc?  Not that it matters much to the modern world who among the Ancients crossed what or whom. Most people I know have only the haziest notion of who Caesar was, never mind Suetonius, and would be hard put to define the Rubicon.  Was it the entrance to a Roman building?

            I believe that the Armada invasion happened.  There are more records to say it did than there are about Caesar, and they are more recent.  There are also artefacts from the galleons.  But these could have been brought in from elsewhere.  The whole story could be a lie: some sort of anti-Spanish or anti-Catholic conspiracy cooked up by Protestant England.  How do you prove an event ever happened, once it has receded into history?

            I believe the date of my birth because I have a certificate recording the circumstance.  In this instance, I was there, even though I remember nothing about it.  The date could, of course, be wrong: based on collusion between my parents and the hospital authorities.  Where is scepticism to end, unless rolling ever onwards into madness?

 

If there is modern doubt about what once seemed assured, equally there is modern assurance about what must be, at best, uncertain.  We say that the New Testament records are unreliable because they are so old; but seem confident to talk about the sounds and colours and skin textures of dinosaurs, which are much older.  We can talk about the prehistoric with confidence precisely because it is exactly that – pre-historic – and there are no written records to contradict our interpretation of surviving artefacts. 

            Social – as opposed to biological – evolutionary theory sometimes assumes continuous progress: as if everyone in the past was less intelligent than those who followed them.  I wish most modern conversations I have encountered could even begin to touch on the sorts of issues raised by Socrates in virtually any Platonic dialogue, and with the same degree of intellectual liveliness.

To  moderns, the savagery of the caveman seems a given.  However, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the Lascaux cave paintings show an exquisite sense of how animals move.  Allowing for primitive colours and limited facilities for lighting within the caves, they are a towering aesthetic achievement, created with love for the subject. We may assume that the paintings relate to primitive religious rituals to ensure success in hunting, or that the animals depicted were the totems of the tribe, but this is pure speculation.  The cave in which they were found might equally have been a nursery, and the pictures might have been there to entertain the kids.  Who knows?  What is missing is eye-witness evidence.

 

It is simply not true that everybody was superstitious in the past and isn’t now.  Some people were superstitious then, some are superstitious now: as ten minutes in a New-Age shop will show you.  When Paul preached Christ and resurrection, the Greeks thought he was talking about two gods.  When they found out what he meant, they laughed at him.  They knew perfectly well that dead bodies don’t come back to life.   The Resurrection was as unbelievable – or believable – in 40 AD/CE as it is today.

            One way in which Paul could counter this sort of scepticism was to say, don’t just take my word for it: ask the other apostles.  One of the definitions of an apostle was one who had seen the risen Christ.  As Paul said, Christ appeared to a group of over five hundred.  Some of them are still alive.  Go and ask them what they saw, or think they saw... 

            Ever since ‘Source Q’ was first postulated, there has been much soul searching in that Matthew traditionally precedes Mark, but Mark is thought to be earlier.  One plausible solution to the problem is the oral record.  An oral Aramaic version of Matthew probably came first, followed by the written Greek of Mark, followed by a Greek translation of the Aramaic version of Matthew. In that sense, both traditions are correct:  Matthew is both earlier than Mark, and later.  Oral records then, after all, were not the sort of Chinese-whispers distortions they would be today: there were Greeks who, given the shortage of writing materials, knew Homer by heart.  Ditto Biblical accounts. That is why in Plato’s Phaedrus, Thaumous criticises Theuth’s invention of writing on the grounds that it will atrophy memory.  Nevertheless, when those who had known Christ in person were dying out, written records were needed to replace their verbal testimony and make it accessible to the widest possible audience. 

            The reliability, or otherwise, of those records is all we have to go on today,  which is why establishing that The Gospel of Thomas was not written at the same time as Mark, but is a Gnostic distortion arising in Syria post-160 AD/CE is a matter of laborious and intricate scholarship for us. Refutation would have been much easier for those living in the Second Century...

 

We are now on a similar cusp of history as the First Century was with the death of the eye witnesses to Christ.  “One day no one will march there at all”, from The Band played ‘Waltzing Matilda’, was prophetic when it was written, but has since come true: all the ANZACS who endured the horrors of Suvla Bay are now dead.  Five hundred years or so hence, will future Australians sceptical about an Oz defeat-in-arms believe that the Gallipoli campaign ever happened?  It will be a matter of faith in the historical record.  What if only a British record survives?  A slander dreamed up by those Pommy bastards, to get their own back for losing at cricket. 

            What about the Holocaust?  There were once the survivors on both sides of the event.  You could talk to Primo Levi, before he committed suicide.  In 1979, the BBC was able to interview Sergeant Wagner of Sobibor Concentration Camp – who said he felt no remorse – before he, too, committed suicide.  At any rate, he was found on the floor with a knife stuck in him, a year after the interview.  If it wasn’t suicide, maybe some one had a grudge against him.  What about?   What was it, about which Wagner felt no remorse?  There are fewer and fewer eye witnesses to whom these questions can be asked. 

            Holocaust denial is happening, and is sure to increase.  All the photographs of the dead at Yad Vashem are just part of a Jewish plot.  The cinematic evidence is faked.  Sure Jews had their heads shaved, but that was to protect them from lice and typhus. Sure some died: there was a lot of illness about.  Those buildings at Auschwitz?  Poles will invent anything to pull in the tourists.  And so on.  I am exaggerating, but not by much.  All the ingenuity brought to bear in denying the validity of the Gospels could soon be unleashed on the Holocaust. 

We have a vested interest in getting rid of the Holocaust.  We would all be a lot more comfortable if we didn’t have to believe it had occurred.  It offends the sense of innate human goodness in which Moderns have been taught to believe.

            That is why The Reader – both as novel and as film – comes at such an important point in history. The title is multi-faceted, but in one sense those of us who in place or time never experienced the event are all ‘readers’ in our attempt to make sense of what happened.  Hanna’s question to the Judge – “What would you have done?” – can hit all of us who did not have to make such choices with a horrible immediacy.  But is what are we reading in The Reader fact or fiction?  And how long before a fictional version of real events blurs into total fiction: especially among those for whom there is no such thing as objective fact?

 

Guessing the future is a notoriously unreliable business, but interpretation of the archaeological remains at Carthage might make us ponder.

            In Leviticus 18:21, there is a warning against delivering your children by fire to Moloch. In other words, do not copy the practices of your neighbours. From the perspective of another culture, historians Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch refer to child sacrifices at Carthage, including babies roasted to death on a bronze statue.  The bones of babies and young children have been found in the ruins of Carthage in what looks to have been a child necropolis.

            Proof of ancient practices?  Not a bit of it, say those touchy about the practices of their ancestors.   They were children who died of disease.  But the bones show no signs of disease, we may counter.  These were healthy children.  Ah, they reply, but claims of child sacrifice are simply enemy propaganda...  The Carthaginians were descendants of the Canaanites, who were the enemies of the Israelites.  Demonize your foe.  The Romans hated Carthage, which proves their historians must have been lying. Anyway, one Roman historian makes no mention of it, and there are no Carthaginian records of child sacrifice.  Yes, but not to mention it is not to say it didn’t happen: maybe he had other things to say, and limited space.  And what if there were Carthaginian records that didn’t survive?  A lot of what Suetonius wrote is lost to us forever.  Or what if details about child sacrifice were never put in writing because the parents hated having to do it and didn’t like being reminded?  And so on. 

Some of the worst orders – at least one concentration-camp commandant was relieved of his post for refusing to obey orders unless he had them in writing – given by the Nazis were purely verbal: precisely because they didn’t want to leave written evidence.  In the last functioning stages of the death camps, they tried  to destroy all their records and nearly succeeded. Imagine, then, this hypothetical scenario. Suppose someone in the future managed to complete the task and dispose of all the surviving Nazi evidence, leaving only the records of the British and the Americans from the Nuremberg Trials.

            Reliable evidence?  Of course not.  They’d been at war with Germany.  Trying to discredit the enemy.  What else would you expect?  And so on.

            In Christ’s story in Luke about the rich man Dives and the poor man Lazarus, Dives – now in torment – asks Abraham if Lazarus – now in bliss – can visit Dives’ brothers to warn them to mend their ways.  Pointless, says Abraham. “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will pay no heed even if someone should rise from the dead.”

To what extent Christ was talking about himself is a fascinating subject for speculation, but equally so is his insight into the scepticism of his time.  It is not simply that people can’t believe.  Far more difficult is that people don’t want to believe, and if they don’t want to, they won’t: whatever the evidence.  Seeing with your own eyes becomes meaningless when you don’t believe in the reality of the moral law.  We, by contrast, believe neither in the reality of the moral law, nor even in the reality of perception.  In that succinct summary of the hard heartedness rather than the hard headedness of his own era, Christ also highlights our own hopeless inability to believe in even the possibility of truth.

            A hundred years hence, then, will belief in the Holocaust have become like belief in the Resurrection: a matter of faith?