THE WAR AGAINST OLD BOOKS

 

When one finds oneself in conversation with a modern religious sceptic, one is treated almost invariably to the dismissal of, “your old books”.  It happens so often that it must be a tactic advocated in the assault manual of some secular High Command: part of the strategy for the eradication of the past in the construction of our brave New world.  (Itself a phrase from the past: but that is by the way.)

     The nature of the assault is interesting.  To dismiss the books because they are religious would be one thing; to dismiss them because they are old is another.  Truth, insofar as truth exists, is something modern: the more modern the more truth.  That takes the discussion beyond the grounds of religion and creates a new battlefront.  There are atheists, after all, who are classicists.  The content of old books is their livelihood. Which side would they be on in this particular battle?    And the dismissal of old books as a generality is, after all, rather sweeping: there are old books and old books.  The point is worth exploring.

 

When I was very young, and used to visit my grandparents, I would immerse myself in my grandfather’s Encyclopaedia Britannica.  Even I, young as I was, realised that this was not a current edition.   That raised a problem: when is a book of knowledge no longer a book of knowledge?  I could see, for instance, that some facts about Shakespeare were fixed:  birth date, death date, number of plays, wives, children, best beds etc.  And I could see that the facts about his place of birth were more fluid: changing population, buildings, occupations etc.  (I had seen such changes, with my own young eyes, in to the suburb where we lived).  Some facts, like those about Shakespeare (and pending new revelations) remained facts; other facts, like those about Stratford, became altered according to circumstance.  (Saying that, we must be careful: the population and townscape of Stratford in, say, 1900 are fixed facts; despite subsequent development.  A building not there in 1900 will never be there in 1900; even if it is there now.  In the same way, attitudes not prevalent there in 1900 will never be prevalent there in 1900; however prevalent they may have become since.)

    That old set of Britannica can serve, I think, as a paradigm of how some sceptics regard believers in relation to the Bible: clinging to an out-of-date book of supposed facts when the facts have since changed in the light of new knowledge.  It depends, of course, on how ‘truth’ is purely factual.   But more of that later.

 

Let us now take a different example: say the works of Galen.  I’ve only ever read a page of Galen.  It was in translation, and about bloodletting.  Galen didn’t know about the circulation of the blood.  He may have been the outstanding physician of his day, but – by our modern standards – his medical knowledge was not only limited, but dangerous.  I wouldn’t want anyone operating on my heart or lungs using a Galen text as a source.  An old book that is well and truly superseded.

     Yet not entirely.  What about valid observations as to the properties of plants?    It is fascinating in The Name of the Rose to read of just how much the medieval herbalists had discovered.  They may have recorded their observations in books now old to us, but they were true observations that are no less true today: even if we now use chemical equivalents that can be produced en masse.  The properties of rhubarb or digitalis are not discredited for having been found out a long time ago.

 

Let us now consider knowledge of a more abstract sort.  There are those who maintain that mathematical truths are fixed truths.  2 + 2 = 4 was true before the Universe came into being, and will still be true even after the Universe has ceased to exist, or – unlike an historical fact – would still be true even if the Universe  had never existed.   “Two and two make five” in 1984 is known to be a lie, even by those who insist on it.  2 + 2 = 4 would still be true, even if it occurred in Euclid; its presence in an old book would not invalidate it.  So some old books can contain at least some truth.

     But, of course, there we’re talking facts.  That’s different.  All right, then, consider Aristotle’s Poetics.  Why does tragedy move us?   For tragedy to work we have to feel pity and fear.  If we cannot care about the victim, we cannot feel pity; we cannot feel fear unless we consider that the victim’s fate might be our own.  We are emotionally purged by the empathetic process of seeing misfortune happen to someone else. 

     That’s not true the way of 2 + 2, but it’s a different sort of truth: true enough to have been written yesterday.  You could apply it to the next sad film or television programme you see, and appreciate the relevance. 

     Or consider the story of Thermopylae from Herodotus.  The fate of Leonidas can still move us the way it might do on the news tomorrow; for bravery in the face of overwhelming odds is not a topic made irrelevant by time.   Herodotus – who recorded the incident – was a genius, although he lived long ago: sharp in observation of different cultures; fulsome in his praise of the Egyptians, although he himself was a Greek.  The basic facts of the Histories need not be invalidated because they are old facts.  True, there is interpretation.  We might be modern, and regret that the Persians didn’t win.  (Maybe they’ll make up for that soon; if they go nuclear).  But even if we say it’s a pity, we are conceding the fact – recorded by Herodotus – that they lost at Plataea.

 

A couple more quick considerations, and my short survey are complete.  Christ washed the disciples’ feet.  There is, I believe, at least one denomination that follows this practice before a meeting.  While not saying that this is wrong, I would argue it is not necessary. The disciples lived in the days of sandals and in a dusty environment.   Males in the West tend to wear shoes and socks, and many work indoors and behind unopened windows.  What are we committed to by Christ’s action: a specific historic example, or to an ongoing principle behind the example?  We may not have to wash one another’s feet nowadays, as a matter of course; but the principle of service to others by mundane tasks remains an imperative. 

     In the early days of motor cars, a man would walk in front with a chequered flag, warning pedestrians of dangerous speeds up to 15 mph.   The flag has gone, but not the principle:  now we have fixed warning signs about speed restrictions.  The biblical injunctions might be the same: a set of principles – based on love of God and your neighbour – that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. 

 

The question I usually put to the sceptic (assuming he/she will suspend disbelief enough for a moment to pretend the existence of God) is this: “If you were God, when would you have got in touch with the human race?  Now, in the twenty-first century, or way back in the primitive and dusty past?”  (Explain creation in terms of 2013, and think how primitive it would seem a n hundred years hence.)

     With your explanation (as God) of why you needed get in touch, and why the human relationship with yourself was no longer spontaneous; although you were the Creator.  What had gone wrong.  And why.  And how it could be put right: short and long term. 

     If that question is allowed – by no means clear cut: some will fight tooth and nail against admitting even the hypothesis (which rather confirms the divine diagnosis) – there is scope for another one:  “If you were God, how would you get in touch?”

    That of course depends on what sort of a divinity God is; and if God exists, and has a determinate nature which precludes certain actions, then the actual options are not, limitless.

    “Subdue the Earth” – a command that any of my regular readers will know I keep coming back to – suggests a collaborative intent between God and humanity. Following on from that, God’s written self-revelation would be a collaboration with human minds: until the ultimate divine/human collaboration of the Incarnate Word. 

 

The Bible.  Primitive in parts in the way Galen was primitive – its talk of flocks, and shepherds, myrrh and hyssop - and true, beyond that,  in the way Galen was true.  A revelation of the unchanging Nature of God: as unchanging as the unchanging truths of mathematics.  Rooted in historical facts like the facts of Herodotus; and with principles for conduct as contemporary, and capable of reinterpretation, as Aristotle’s theory of catharsis.  Above all, the big narrative (ignoring Lyotard) of Creation, Fall,  and Redemption.  All this in an old book: unchanging divine truth filtered through the minds and knowledge of an ancient people.  So what is the real nature of the complaint against the Bible?  Its age?  Or its message?

 

Both, I’d say.  Remember, though, that the war against the Bible is a part of the larger war against the past by those committed to a future Utopia.    If the Bible goes down that is not the end of it.  Say goodbye also, to Homer and to Virgil, to Aeschylus and Plato.

     Although, it must be said, an exception might be made for Epicurus, or Lucretius.  Even an old book may be allowed to survive; if its message accords with the assumptions of Modernity.

NAZI SEXUALITY

When I was trying in my teens to make sense of Nazism, I found myself confronted with the Night of the Long Knives: when Ernst Röhm, leader of the Storm troopers and Hitler’s devoted follower, was assassinated.  (I am in debt for the reminder, and for some of this material, to Gene Edward Veith’s invaluable book Modern Fascism.  I recommend it if you want to understand the fascist roots of  Existentialism: Heidegger-style.)

     Partly, the Long-Knives event could be understood as a necessary purging: the inevitable outcome of  a power struggle between the brown shirt amateurs and the black shirt SS professionals. 

     But Röhm had been killed at a particular and symbolic time: while in bed with his male lover.  What was going on?

     It is explicable, I think, in terms of the inherent contradictions of the Nazi back-to-nature view of sexuality.

 

Nature is  notoriously fickle as  a guide to conduct.  There are so many conflicting guides from which one might choose.

     Consider the behaviour of dogs when a bitch is on heat.  There are three consistent conclusions that might be drawn.

     Firstly, a free-for-all without regard to place, person or potential audience.  Follow suit, and pitch in.  There we have the modern approach to pornography.

     Secondly, however, with dogs there is a restraint in regard to timing.  Things happen when a bitch is on heat.   Why does she come on heat?  In order to reproduce.  The reason for the sex act, therefore, is reproduction: in the animal world, anyway.

     Thirdly,  if you are a dog breeder you restrict what gets access if you want to avoid the production of mongrels.  See where  the Nazis were headed?

 

In their attack on “bourgeois” values, French and Italian fascists stressed sexual freedom: the unconstrained expression of instinctive desires. 

     German fascists, however, tended to be more conservative.  There were those, like Rosenberg, who urged restraint.  Although this may have superficially resembled the old Judeo-Christian ethic, the rationale was very different.  Any reform was to be along the lines of eugenics: selective breeding to improve the quality of the race.  And with a programme of selective breeding – to be implemented as quickly as possible – homosexuality was a hindrance.

     The purged SA had been rife with homosexuality: but for ideological rather than biological reasons.  It was the concept of Männerbund: the bond of men.  It had been forged in the trenches: the reliance on your comrade for very survival.  Ideological homosexuality – the ultimate physical expression of male bonding – was sometimes the result.

     But for biological  theorists like Rosenberg, the purpose of the sex act was the breeding of the Aryan race.  Promiscuity was  to be discouraged because it might lead to indiscriminate breeding.  Homosexuality was also to be  discouraged because it turned the sex act away from its biological and racial function.  Similar conclusions to the Judeo-Christian tradition about sexual conduct, but for totally different reasons: as Veith expresses it, because of immanence rather than transcendence. 
     Thus for a woman to breed for the State was more important than to be married.   (It was proposed that after the war, to replenish Aryan stock, a man might be permitted two wives.)  Whilst abortion was compulsory for Slav or Polish women in prison camps, it was forbidden for German women  except in the case of “racial emergency”:  mixed blood, say, or manifest birth defects.
 

The pioneer sexual liberationists – Kinsey et al  –  seem to have assumed that you could get rid of sexual problems simply by getting rid of the Christian sexual ethic.  But you don’t, necessarily.  As the Nazis found, you simply give yourself a new set of issues about conduct in exchange for the old. 

 

DIVINE DECEPTIONS

When I was a child, one of my Christmas presents was a box of magic tricks.  You could make a magic wand rise by virtue of the rubber band concealed behind it.  And so on.  A little booklet contained the data for a dozen card tricks.  It was fun, but also deflating in a way.  The card tricks that seemed so baffling became trivial once one understood how they worked.  And with everything else in the box, there was the issue that all the tricks relied on deception.  It was fine when your audience knew that to be the case.  But what if they didn’t?  Endless grounds for manipulation of the gullible.

     The sort of thing I mean occurs in King Solomon’s Mines.  Foreknowing that there will be a solar eclipse, the English adventurers declare that they will black out the Sun.  In a good cause – to help a rightful claimant secure his throne – but a result achieved, none the less, by what is effectively a lie. 

     The downside of such tactics against the credulous can be seen in Rudyard Kipling’s novella The Man Who Would Be King.   Dravot is assumed to be a god until he bleeds; whereupon the priests realise that he is nothing but a human.  With attendant consequences.  

 

A similar sort of assumption underlies the God-of-Gaps argument, or the rejection of miracles.  Things were once assumed to be miraculous, or explicable only by the presence of God; but now we know better.  As knowledge increases, so the role of God diminishes.  One day there will be no need for God at all.  But is this a valid comparison with the magic box, or isn’t it? 

     Take the case of the rainbow.  It was thought, so the argument runs, to be God’s covenant with Noah.  But now we know it to be caused by the splitting of white sunlight into component colours by raindrops.  Refraction, wavelengths etc.  We must abandon the idea of the covenant.

     Or  must we?  For are we comparing like with like?

     What is actually implied, after all?   That the rainbow did not exist before the Flood?  Then there really would be a case to answer.  Or is it simply that the rainbow is now made into a promise?  If  that is the issue, then knowing how a rainbow is formed is irrelevant to its covenantal significance.

     When Verdi composed Nabucco, the song of the Hebrew slaves achieved a symbolic significance for  the subject Italians against their Austrian oppressors.  That they whistled it could not prove subversion: they were simply whistling a catchy tune they knew from Nabucco.  And knowing a lot about music, how Verdi composed, when it was written, and in what key: none of that would have made the slightest difference as to whether or not the song was symbolic.  

     You can be powerfully moved by a painting, even if you know nothing about the mechanics of art.  Knowing the stages of composition, the nature of the pigments, the artistic school within which the work arose etc, does not mean that the picture no longer exists.  And it need not alter in any way the emotional effect it has on you.  

 

Something similar (technically, a debate about Realism and Nominalism) is at work with the Witch in C S Lewis’ The Silver Chair:  The hanging lamp reminds the trapped Narnians of the Sun.  But the Sun is an illusion.  Because you see the lamp, you imagine the existence of something like it, but greater.  Lions, equally, do not exist.  Because you have seen a cat, you imagine a bigger, more powerful version; but simply imagining it does not mean that it exists. 

     Because we know about human fathers, we imagine a divine one.  This  was the sort of argument against God and Heaven posited by Feuerbach: taken up enthusiastically – and more famously – by Marx and Freud.

     It cuts two ways, of course,  Because we get thirsty may be the proof that water is an illusion.  Or it may be the proof that we are creatures who need to sustain ourselves by drinking.  The hunger for God may prove God to be an illusion; or it may suggest that we were not created for spiritual self-sufficiency.

     Lewis’ Silver-Chair argument, of course, it is only an analogy.  The sceptic will counter that we have seen  real lions, and we have seen the Sun.  We have not seen God.

     To which the Christian may reply that there were those who did, when Christ once walked the Earth. 

     And for the rest of us, the question is not “If?", but “When?” 

 

 

WHO OWNS A POEM? BLAKE'S 'JERUSALEM'

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

 

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded her

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

 

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of Fire.

 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green & pleasant land. 

 

 

Swift wrote a savage political satire that included – with the Yahoos – the ultimate (literary) attack on the human race.  Contrary to his intentions – and to his wishes, had he lived to see the result – it became (suitably expurgated) a children’s classic.   A similar sort of fate has befallen Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.

 

See it without explanation in an anthology, and you would probably take it to mean something like this.  Did Christ ever visit England?  If he were to visit now (ie 1804), what would he make of all those mills that keep appearing?  I’m going to fight, and keep fighting, to ensure that industrial ugliness isn’t allowed to ruin the pastoral landscape: some sort of synthesis between city and nature as you find in the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation.   That, more or less, is what the British public take it to mean when they hear it sung. 

 

Actually, what Blake meant when he wrote it is something rather different. (Which isn’t to say he wasn’t aware of horrible social/industrial conditions.  Just look at ‘London’, or ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ from Songs of Experience.)

     Blake is one of those difficult writers who employ a private mythology.  And to compound the confusion, mixed in with his own mythological characters like Nobodaddy and Urizen are words from the public domain like ‘clouds’, ‘mills’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

     Clouds, for Blake, represent religious obscurantism.  The ‘mills’ are the altars of the churches – there is a statement somewhere that is specific about this – on which the natural instincts of humanity are sacrificed/ground down.  He is thinking of the old, biblical-style corn mill rather than anything industrial. (Or Milton’s “Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves”.)  Jerusalem, most confusingly of all, represents the state of mental freedom: which, of course, also incorporates sexual freedom.

     ‘Jerusalem’, then, is more in the tradition of the sexual-liberation poems – ‘The Garden of Love’, ‘A Little Girl Lost’, ‘The Sun-Flower’ – than in the tradition of ‘London’.

 

A further confusion is that the poem we think of as ‘Jerusalem’ is not Blake’s Jerusalem at all: which is a long experiment in several “chapters”.   What we call ‘Jerusalem’ is actually the preface to the poem Milton.

     In the introductory prose polemic, Blake rails against the classical models that have limited Milton.  In other words: foreign influences that have had a restrictive influence on the instincts.  For although Milton was probably Blake’s favourite poet, Blake disliked Milton’s Puritanism.  Perhaps he saw it as something that stifled natural impulses.  For the poem that follows the prose Preface and precedes Book the First seems to have exactly that theme: the restrictive influence of Christianity (as misinterpreted by the Church) on the old druidic nature religion it superseded.

    Following this sort of line, we end with something rather different from a critique of the Industrial Revolution.  The advent of Christianity destroyed the old nature religion of the Druids.  It is their feet that are referenced in the first verse/stanza.  You can’t have mental/sexual freedom when the churches stifle vitality.  Blake will fight the Church for the freedom of the impulses, and will continue to fight until said freedom has been obtained.

     Milton, Blake goes on to say, wrote in chains because he was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.  Blake puts him right with the proper way of reading Paradise Lost.

     Not that it matters that much if old Johnny got it wrong:  Heaven and Hell are one and the same thing if only we can cleanse the Doors of Perception and see things as they really are. (This from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)    You can see why Jim Morrison admired Blake, and named the group in Blake’s honour. 

 

To sum up, here we have the same poem with two quite incompatible readings.  So… who owns the poem?

     In the past, we would have said the poet.  You tried to understand what the poet was getting at, and modified your own views accordingly.

     Modern literary practices like Reception Theory, or Reader-Response Criticism have changed all that.  Meaning now resides with the reader, not the writer.  the text means what we, the readers, say it means.  What if different readers disagree with one another as well as with the author?   Welcome to the modern world.

     As an author of sorts myself, I’m on the side of the author.   With this particular poem, though, I prefer the interpretation of the general, unenlightened reader.  An instance in which ignorance is bliss, but I  – regrettably – have eaten of the apple of knowledge, and lost my Blakean Innocence by falling into Blakean Experience.

 

 

BLAKE'S FLY

 

 

                                                 Little Fly,

                                 Thy summer’s play

                                 My thoughtless hand

                                  Has brushed away.

 

                                 Am not I

                                A fly like thee?

                                Or art not thou

                               A man like me?

 

                                 For I dance,

                                And drink, & sing

                                Till some blind hand

                                Shall brush my wing.

 

                                 If thought is life

                                 And strength & breath,

                                And the want

Of thought is death;

 

Then am I

A happy fly

If I live

Or if I die.

 

 

One of the great things in writing about Blake is that you can often quote one of his poems in full.  If poetry compresses thought, then Blake compresses poetry.

            Blake’s fly poem has always made me somewhat uneasy.  Is it mawkishly sentimental, or ruthlessly cynical?  What’s going on?

            For a start, the whole tone of the thing would make much more sense if the creature were a bee.  When De La Mare speaks of the “honey fly”, that is presumably what he means.  Unless they sting you, bees are nice; and you can eat what they produce with impunity.  Eating what a fly has produced can make you ill.  That is why bee swatters don’t exist as far as I know, whereas fly swatters do.  Orwell’s Benjamin the donkey doesn’t have any complaints about bees, but he does have something to say about flies.  It is not for nothing that Beelzebub was also known as ‘Lord of the Flies’.

However, given that Blake drew the ghost of a flea – interestingly, in a human form: and splendidly muscular at that – we must allow him his penchant for insects that the rest of us are inclined to think of as antisocial.  Let’s assume, then, that when Blake says a fly that is what he means.  And there the trouble starts.  Summer’s play?  For a start, a fly only lasts about thirty days if something else doesn’t get it first.  It doesn’t have time to play.  It’s too busy growing up, mating in whatever way flies do, and foraging for food in ways that humans would not countenance.  Then, in my experience, flies move so fast it’s very hard to kill them by accident.  And if you do get one, it’s an occasion for celebration rather than regret.  That’s why a “thoughtless hand” is very rare in regard to flies: they’re too noisy and irritating, second only to a child in a supermarket. Usually it’s a determined and purposeful hand, with some kind of implement attached.

Of course, when Blake says a fly that isn’t – or isn’t just – what he does mean.  At the back of the poem is presumably the thought from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

That’s the pagan take on things: the gods exist, but they are cruel.  Blake’s view – or rather the view expressed in the poem: Blake’s own take on things seems to have been Gnostic, with a complicated personal twist – is much more typically modern.  What kills the fly and the human is not something deliberate, but a completely random act of nature.  There is no special dividing line between humanity and the rest of the breathing world.  Fly or human – what’s the difference? – you follow your instincts, and have fun with whatever gives you a buzz until something gets you.  Or, as Paul Simon put it in a later age: “That’s all there is, and the leaves that are green turn to brown.” 

If the poem had ended after the third verse, it would have held together beautifully.  In the last two verses, however, a completely new idea enters that seems to be a sort of take on Descartes, in which thought and instinct seem interchangeable. Whether you’re a man or a fly the message is the same:  keep thinking and you stay alive; stop thinking, and you die.  Thinking and breathing, so Blake explicitly suggests,  are one and the same.

Lots of problems with that.  I can’t speak for the thought processes of flies – I’m generally too busy trying to swat them to attempt a conversation with them – but what about all those humans who are healthily and happily alive without any apparent evidence of thought? You can, after all, breathe without thinking; but not the other way round.  Or not for very long.  And what about the hand that can brush away a thinker – human or fly variety – still busily engaged in pondering the big questions?  As so often happens when thought gets involved, everything seems to become a little muddled. The first part of the poem suggests that it’s chance that gets you, and that’s an idea that anyone – thinker or otherwise – can relate to: even if the idea is rejected.  “Till some blind hand/Shall brush my wing” is, for me, the outstanding concept in the poem, and perfectly expressed.

 

Man as an animal in a random universe has become almost axiomatic since Darwin.  It’s interesting to see the idea so well established – Blake’s Songs of Experience came out in 1794 – long before The Origin of Species.  Actually, it goes back to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and – before that – to Democritus via Epicurus.  The problem with the whole tradition for me, whether in its Epicurean, Blakean or Darwinian version, is the thoughtless hand.  What has simply been left out of the picture is the purposeful hand with the fly swatter.  And that’s a fairly serious omission.

 

PARALLELISM IN THE 'GENESIS' CREATION ACCOUNT

Even a cursory reading of the Old Testament will reveal the use of parallelism: saying the same thing in two different ways.  It happens all the time in Isaiah: 

            Never again shall she (Babylon) be inhabited,

            No man shall dwell in her through all the ages;

            There no Arab shall pitch his tent,
            No shepherds fold their flocks.

A similar sort of process is evident in the opening chapters of Genesis: it has often been commented on that Days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6 are in tandem with one another.

     Day One is concerned with darkness, and the creation of light.  Day Four focuses on that in more detail: the creation of the Sun, Moon and stars.   Follow a strict chronological pattern, and there is a real problem how light can be created before the Sun.

    On  Day Two, God separates the waters above from the waters below and creates the sky and the oceans.  In Day Five, He populates the sky with flying creatures and the waters with swimming creatures.

     On Day Three, God separates land from sea, so that plants may appear.  Day Six again fleshes out the detail with the creation of animals and the human race.

     Parallelism accounts for the so-called two creation accounts.  The first focuses on the creation of humanity in relation to other creatures; the second homes in on the special relationship with God. 

I personally refuse to be drawn on six literal days versus six God-length days versus six geological eras.  I do not believe chronology was the authors’ (both human and divine) intention.

     I believe that the author’s (human author, now) intention under divine influence was to stress that one God made the world: not chance, not a multiplicity of gods.  God made the world out of nothing: not, as in other creation accounts, out of pre-existing matter; or the corpses of other gods killed in a cosmic war.

     I believe that the author wished to convey that an originally-good creation has been spoiled: that Nature and human nature alike are not as they were intended.  The natural divine-human relationship has been severed; leaving the necessity of repair.

     I do not believe that the Bible contains everything we need to know for life on this Earth, but I do believe that it contains everything that we need to know for our salvation.  And, in that respect, the opening of Genesis leads the way.

 

MARY MAGDALENE AND MARY OF BETHANY

Are Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany one and the same person?   This is not a new idea, and it has a perfectly respectable pedigree: it was first mooted by Pope Gregory 1.  It becomes problematic only when it gets into books like The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.   Then we get something like this.

            Christ married at the age of about sixteen.  He married Mary Magdalene/Mary of Bethany – take your pick, they’re one and the same person – at the wedding at Cana.  Barabbas was an early son.  At the crucifixion, the crowd called for Barabbas so that the son could be preserved, even if the father had to die.  In fact, Christ was given opium on a sponge: fooling the Romans into thinking he was dead.  Pregnant Mary Magdalene was then smuggled across to France by Joseph of Arimathea and Lazarus:  the “beloved disciple” and Christ’s brother-in-law.   Christ may have joined Mary in France and fathered more children.   And so on.   The rest we know from The da Vinci Code.

 Readers seeking a balanced interpretation of the evidence would do well to try John Wenham’s little gem of a book, Easter Enigma.  This makes a convincing case for the extra-biblical Western tradition that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were, indeed, one and the same person.  Here is a brief summary; although no substitute for the book itself.

            Mary, leaving Bethany, became a courtesan in Magdala.  Spiritually rescued by Christ (the “seven devils”), she wept at his feet.  Luke does not mention her by name, since the Gospel writers are reticent about dwelling on the past sins of believers.  She returned to Bethany, and later anointed Christ with oil in a re-enactment of the earlier event.

            That is the only support that Wenham’s work lends to the theories of Baigent  and Co.  Mary, for Wenham, witnessed the Crucifixion and the Resurrection: as befitted one of the most devoted of Christ’s followers.  After the Mother of our Lord, she is the most favoured woman in the Bible who appears “as suddenly as a meteor, shines brightly for a moment, and then disappears forever.”  No more and no less.

INCLUSION AND THE INFANT CHRIST

Nature in awe to him

        Had doffed her gaudy trim

                                    Milton: On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity

As the November adverts for the secular festival of Christmas move into top gear, I am reminded of the urge to make the nativity story – when it isn’t banned altogether – somewhat more inclusive.  Joseph and Mary as Eastern European immigrants.  Or whatever other new twist the ingenious human imagination, floating free of the constraints of history, can come up with.

       In this I am reminded of Christ’s words about the lilies: exceeding Solomon in all his glory.  Attempts to gild the lily are as doomed to failure as they are unnecessary.  So are efforts to update the Nativity Story.  Social Inclusion may be a worthy objective, but it in terms of inclusion it is hardly possible to improve upon the original.

Matthew’s Gospel begins with a table of the descent of Jesus Christ on his mother’s side.  The list is unusual: it includes women.   And some of them disreputable.  Rahab: the prostitute; Ruth the foreigner.  Solomon’s mother who, as Matthew makes a point of stressing, had been the wife of Uriah.  And stolen from him by King David.  Not only women, then, but some of dubious pedigree.  And all of them adding to the penultimate end product, Mary; and the ultimate, Christ.

            Luke comments that when Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, hears Mary’s greeting, the child stirs in her womb.  The stirring child and the moving star: Nature herself is responding to the event.  Christ is laid in a manger: the animal world is included.  Whether or not sheep were present, shepherds are certainly involved.  The shepherds were at the bottom of the social pile, and yet it is to them that the angels bring the good news.  At the other end of the social scale are the Magi: who are also foreigners, and adherents of an alien religion. 

            They are not the only foreigners in the story.  The Roman Emperor requires a census, precipitating quite unwittingly the movement to Bethlehem that fulfils the Messianic prophecy.  History, too, is tied up in this event.

            The old.  When Christ is presented in the temple, Simeon is there: the one who had been told he would not see death until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.  And not a privilege reserved for men: Anna, the prophetess, is there as well.

You can – like Richard Dawkins – dismiss it all as ancient scribblings.  You can – like a theologian dulled by proximity to the text - see it as fiction manufactured after the event.   You can – as I do – see it as authentic research by the careful and reputable historian, Luke.  (Luke is generally regarded as being by Luke: even by those who struggle with the idea of Matthew or John). 

            Whichever view you take, you would be hard put to find a birth story more all-encompassing than this one.