The Flavian Hypothesis

Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus (30 December 39 AD – 13 September 81 AD)

John,

 ...

I’m going to freewheel through this, which is often a good way of developing a frame for a more detailed discussion. Hard to know where to start, since there are several possible starting points.

I’ll start with Eusebius. You suggested to me that we did not know why Eusebius wrote his works. But we do know why he wrote what he did, since the texts contain the motive and purpose of his writings, from his own pen. The title of his Preparation for the Gospel says exactly what it is for. It is based on the idea that all ancient peoples, and all ancient religions, were in darkness, and struggling for the light before the arrival of Christianity. And the Christian gospels (and other related writings) represent the final arrival of the human race at a point where their engagement with God is soundly based. Christianity is a religion in which it is possible to live a good and moral life, unlike former religions, which embraced barbarity and sin, on a daily basis.

Few now read Eusebius apart from historians of Christianity, since most of the quotations and summaries of earlier works have been extracted, and collected together elsewhere (Isaac Preston Cory was one of the first to produce a collection of ancient fragments in the early nineteenth century). We have evidence however that he was not making these earlier documents up (He quoted from the Babyloniaka, a three volume work by the former high priest of Bel in Babylon, who moved to Athens in the fourth century BCE. These quotations are consistent with what we find in the tablets from Mesopotamia. So Eusebius had access to either the Babyloniaka itself, or summaries of its contents, as late as the early fourth century CE), though the use to which he put them was to suggest that Christianity was on the way, and that these earlier works were foreshadowings of the gospels, and of the Christian church. That interpretation of the worth of earlier documents was something which Eusebius (and other scholars)  constructed, and which was used as a frame  to select the relevant evidence.

I came across the detail of the Flavian hypothesis relatively recently, but I find the concept that the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus were written by Roman and Greek scholars credible, and that they were written in order to counter messianic Judaism, which was almost out of control at the time the gospels were composed. And that this was to be achieved by creating a messianic figure who urged peace, ‘turning the other cheek’, and ‘rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s’. And furthermore, one who had already lived, rather than one who was yet to arrive.

Joseph Atwill’s paralleling of Titus’s campaign’s in Judaea (which appear in the writings of Josephus, who was an adopted son of the Flavian family) with the movements of Jesus is particularly compelling.

   

So it can be understood as a very sophisticated piece of propaganda to further the ends of the Imperial family, and of Rome. The Flavian propaganda used techniques similar to those familiar to religious scholars and priests, particularly in Judaea, where later compositions used earlier writings and stories as their basis. The earlier writings, when paired with the later ‘types’ in the later writings, communicated information about the meaning of the more recent texts (if you have a polyglot Bible, you can see the lengths to which this procedure can be taken). That’s what the authors of the Gospels and other New Testament books were doing. And in a sense, that is also what Eusebius was doing, but without much reverence for the pagan past.

 Stepping a little sideways for a moment, when I was fifteen I attempted to read Isaac Asiimov’s Foundation trilogy. I got the general idea of the human race experiencing a cultural crisis from which they needed to be shielded, but it was hard to understand why the psychohistorians did this by restructuring history and culture. And why Asimov had written these books. Asimov is known mainly for his science fiction, but he also wrote many books on history. I did not find that out until recently also. And then I came across a quotation from him, concerning the writing of the trilogy. He said that at the time he was ‘cribbin’ Gibbon.’

Suddenly everything lit up. Asimov had read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and understood that Gibbon’s account of the interaction between the Roman Empire and Christianity (in particular) contained materials which suggested a sophisticated set of fabrications, and literary and cultural manipulation. A historical fraud of immense proportions.

I haven’t read the entirety of Gibbon’s epic work ,so I don’t know whether Asimov figured this out himself from Gibbon’s account, or whether Gibbon himself knew. I suspect that the latter is the case, since his account portrays the rise of Christianity in negative terms (He regarded all forms of religion as contrary to reason).

The point here is that the idea that there is fabrication at the root of Christianity is not a new one. The Flavian hypothesis puts a lot more flesh on the bones however. If Gibbon did know (and he read all of the relevant materials, including Josephus) it would have been difficult or even impossible for him to publish his book. There is a Ph.D thesis in it for someone to critically examine Gibbon’s text for clues as to whether or not he was writing around something that he dare not say.

I will write a little later about ‘chrest’ and Roman imperial ideas of the divine.

Hope you are well,

Best,

Thomas

The Destruction of Ancient Astronomy

There is a tide in the affairs of men./Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/
Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries./
On such a full sea are we now afloat,/And we must take the current when it serves,/
Or lose our ventures./ (Brutus to Cassius, in Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224)

Of course that didn’t work out well in the end, since they chose to fight Octavian at Philippi, and lost. The point is however that everything has a tendency to follow an arc through time, and it is very difficult to preserve an insight or a way of thinking over an extended period. Or an empire. Or anything at all.  And sometimes the tide is in favour of your opponents.

We can look at what happened as a disaster of sorts. But it is also something of a miracle that so much survives, in some shape or form. The astronomy was still intact in the civilizations of South America when the Spanish arrived, followed by the missionaries, and there is still information circulating in the populations, as the writer and anthropologist William Sullivan found out (The Secret of the Incas). Despite the efforts of the Spanish priests to root it out. 

Why did the Christians take against astronomy and astronomical lore? There are two ways in which to look at this question. 

The sky, imagined as a moving image of god, or eternity, is one, and what it is. This seems to have been a deeply rooted idea from time immemorial, and it surfaces in the writing of Plato, and in the later Platonists. The oneness of the image is perhaps the main reason for its identification as an image of god. Another is that it was understood to be forever beyond our reach. But in addition, it contains other images, some of which were identified and described as gods. Not all of them were anthropomorphic deities, but by virtue of their presence in the heavens, all of them had a kind of divine status.

So, the heaven represents what is one and divine, and at the same time contains a plethora of gods. For the Christians, and not just the early ones, that must have been a disturbing thing to contemplate.

Polytheism is one of the most difficult things for human beings (in the modern west) to deal with, both within academia, and in the population at large. Historians and theologians argue that polytheism arose before monotheism, and that it represents an earlier and more barbarous form of religion. And yet, the idea that they both have their reality somewhere in a moving image of God is there in the sky above us.

Scholars will argue that polytheism shows that early man was not thinking of the divine in terms of a single overarching abstraction, which could be imagined to be responsible for the creation, for existence, for generation, etc. And yet, if the myths concerning the gods who belong to a polytheistic pantheon are explored, we find evidence of abstract thought, ideas of creation, the generation and ordering of earthly reality, etc. Instead, it will be argued that the polytheistic gods are representations of things which were important in human society, and which needed to be placated. Therefore they can be interpreted as personifications of natural forces (the existence of storm gods is usually regarded as a clincher), or representations of tribal gods or totems, later integrated into a pantheon which reflects the society built up from earlier and looser groupings.

None of that is impossible, and in many cases, that might be the best explanation. But it is a lazy way to look at intellectual and social history, when there is in existence clear evidence that monotheistic and polytheistic patterns of thought once both belonged to the same model of reality.

One of the most ancient of questions is ‘why are there many, if there is one?’ Thousands of years of theological and philosophical thought were shaped by that question. Considering that the one (or Being itself) is the only truly real thing, does not force us to deny the existence of multiplicity. But it does create a problem, in that it is not easy to find the explanation for multiplicity. One of the ancient arguments was that since only the one was truly real, the world of physical reality was an illusion – a set of subjective perceptions of Being which stand between us and an understanding of Being itself. 

This multiplicity also can be interpreted as the product of the divine’s understanding of itself. In which case, we are part of the working out of what the divine is. Mythology and polytheistic conceptions can be understood as the articulation of that working out.

The point here is that the idea of many gods is deeply disturbing to many human beings, and not just for doctrinal reasons. It is disturbing because there is a deep seated, rarely formulated, and mostly unconscious conception in us that reality (however that is understood) must be itself, and itself alone. The corollary of that is that multiplicity enshrines falsehood and error. Add to that the general view that we are getting smarter over time (the myth of progress, which J.B. Bury wrote about in the twenties) and that we left error behind when (in the west at least) we embraced monotheism instead of polytheism (the concept of the trinity notwithstanding).

This body of ideas spills out into political and social notions (not always in a bad way – many socio-political creations in antiquity owed their origin to discussions of the nature of the divine, and its manifestation in physical reality. The unification of the poleis in Attica is a case in point – the administrative, political and liturgical functions of the state were expressly modelled on the natural divisions of the year).

The political and theological development of the Hebrew kingdoms in the first half of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. is mostly unknown to us, since the texts were redacted in the 5^th century B.C.E., and reflect the views of the winners of the hegemonic struggle. But we can tell from the later history the general outline of the trajectory of change. Early on there seems to have been a considerable amount of freedom of religious worship in the Hebrew kingdoms (these were also modelled on the natural divisions of the year) until they came into severe conflict with Assyria. After that political and religious power became ever more concentrated in Jerusalem. One god, one power, one place of religious observance, one source of the law, etc.

Christianity, gifted to us partly as the consequence of a similar concentration of power in ancient Rome (another story), took over the idea of a single omniscient god, who was also able to become flesh and blood and walk on the earth (and on water too, which image reflects Babylonian iconography). All the other gods became, in the end, falsehoods, demons, devils, and in the pages of Tertullian, a species of fornication, which he reckoned to be the principal nature of sin, which embraced all others.

Hence the antipathy to astronomy, and the gods from cultures who foolishly embraced a multiplicity of them. Despite the fact that, the Christian scriptures, as well as the Hebrew ones, are full of astronomical and mythological imagery, and characters who were once understood to have their essential reality in the sky. 

The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth

Where are my books going? What is the point I’m trying to make by writing them?

There is something very important about the way the cosmos was understood in antiquity, which has been lost almost entirely. But not actually entirely, as I have found out in conversation with readers since my first book was published in November 2015. Some readers seem to grasp the ancient understanding almost intuitively, without having to know how it can be approached at a technical level.  Others arrive at the knowledge as the result of logical argument. It is also possible to approach the knowledge on the basis of the study of ancient literature, liturgy, philosophy, and iconography.

My own way into the ancient understanding began perhaps with discovering the statement Matthew 16: 19 concerning the ‘Keys of the Kingdom’, which is a phrase used only once in the Bible.

 “ whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven”

I first read this when I was about fifteen, and at school, and wondered at what it could possibly mean. It remained a mystery to me for some time – it would have been an entirely fruitless business to bring it up in our religious instruction class. The full passage extends from Matthew 16, verse 13-20, which I quote here:

13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.
18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

This passage concerns the knowledge that the Son of Man is in  fact God incarnate. Jesus asks questions of his disciples about their understanding of who he is, and they reply with different interpretations. All except Simon Peter answered by suggesting he is one of the prophets. Simon Peter on the other hand, identifies him directly as the Messiah, and declares that he is the Son of the living God.

Jesus declares that Simon Peter is blessed, on account of this identification, "for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood” (i.e., by anything or any experience with roots and nature in the physical and secular world), “but by my Father in heaven”. He then proceeds to proclaim this idea as the rock on which “I will build my church”. There is a pun here of course on Simon Peter’s name – Petros - which means ‘rock’. But the meaning of the passage is that the Church (ekklesia) is to be built on the idea that whatever is bound on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever is loosed on earth will be loosed in heaven. This power constitutes the Keys of the Kingdom (of God).

Peter here represents a personification of the Church, but it is the Church itself which is important, and whose nature is being defined. Jesus is saying is that there is an essential identity between Heaven and Earth, and between the Father (in Heaven) and the Son (on Earth). However difficult a concept this may be to grasp, since it seems to defy logic. Simon Peter does grasp this, and he is made blessed and holy by this understanding.

As I said, this remained a passage which was hard to fathom for many years, despite the fact that it came to serve an important function for the Catholic church, in that the Church knows Saint Peter as the first Bishop of Rome, and claims that the power of the 'keys of the kingdom of God' is therefore invested in their Church. But its meaning is so much more interesting than that.

It is in fact a passage which parodies the Mesopotamian understanding of the relationship between gods in heaven, and incarnations of the gods on earth. I’ve written extensively about this in The Sacred History of Being. Babylonian priests could set up gods in heaven, and on earth, and they had a complex ritual process (lasting three days) which allowed them to do this. Close study of the texts associated with this process tell us a great deal about the logic which underpins it, and indeed the priests have the power to both create and to decommission gods both in heaven and on earth.

The king in Babylonia, as the living representative of Bel/Marduk on Earth, had the power to confer a temporary divinity upon the workmen making or refurbishing the divine images, which power could then be removed when they had finished their work. Part of the ceremony involved the ritual parody of their hands being cut off with a knife of tamarisk wood, symbolising the removal of their capacity to make gods. Which was their ability to join together divinity in heaven, and divinity on Earth, and to bind and loose in two worlds.

The holiness code in Leviticus confirms this interpretation that there is, for some reason which is hardly ever spelled out, an essential identity between heaven and Earth

“I am the Lord your God. If I am Holy, then you must be Holy”. (Leviticus 19.2).

Many in the modern world struggle with the idea of the incarnation of the divine on earth, and divinity made flesh. It was a struggle for many in antiquity also, hence the importance that faith (without understanding) came to have.  There are real answers out there to this question however, which illuminate much about ancient thought, religion, liturgy and literature, and they are worth spelling out.

The Tangled Thread: Universals in History

[This is a draft version of one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This piece of text was the original (and short) opening chapter to the draft of The Sacred History of Being which was on my desk in 2004. I was toying with a number of possible titles for the book at the time, and the favoured title of the moment (June 2004) was The Shrine in the Sea. This was because there was a large focus on the Mesopotamian idea of the Abzu, home to Enki/Ea at the bottom of the sea. Ea was the broad-eared Mesopotamian god of wisdom, and all important things were understood to point back, in the end, towards the Abzu. Hence, the inauguration of divine statues required that the Abzu be closely referenced in liturgy and ritual, and the inaugurations took place where there was physical proximity to objects with symbolic connections to the Abzu, such as quays and river banks (all rivers in Mesopotamia being considered divine [DINGIR.ID]), and the thresholds of temples. These details (and the rituals themselves) are discussed in detail in the closing chapters of The Sacred History of Being.

The liturgies and the description of the rituals have been published and translated, and their signifcance and meaning have been discussed by scholars. But they make difficult reading for the reason that they involve a different set of preconceptions from those understood by Mesopotamian scholars. It is hard to break through to an understanding of what was understood to be going on. Given the enormous passage of time since these rituals were devised, that is perhaps not surprising. 

But there is another level of difficulty which we have created for ourselves, and in relatively recent times. The Mesopotamians employed ideas which they considered to be universally valid, such as all wisdom being present in the Abzu, and that the acquisition of knowledge depended on some kind of ritual engagement with Ea and the Abzu. And that the good order of the world depended on man's relation to the world of the divine. 

Since the European Enlightenment, we have adopted another set of universal notions, which do not depend at all on the reality of the divine and the gods. In fact it pushes such notions into the shadowlands of unreason. So there is little inclination among scholars who specialise in Mesopotamia to spend time trying to makes sense of things which are intrinsically unreasonable in nature. 

***

In an age where both ideas of realpolitik and the centrality of ideology and different varieties of determinism (philosophical and economic in particular) are assumed by professional historians to be the constants in history which eluded our predecessors, it is easy to introduce suppositions into historical analysis without any sense of violating the proper context of the evidence. I will deal some of the difficulties in the course of this book. For now it is enough to mention the difficulties which stand between us and the use of evidence which does more than fit the pieces crudely into a pattern of meaning conformant with expectation, or at least fits within the parameters of what we are prepared to countenance as a credible model of the past.

More significant than individual difficulties however, is the complex interaction of one with the other, and the successive layers of these interacting obstacles to our understanding. Any age has a body of beliefs, sometimes contradictory and multiple, and differing across social groups, societies and nations, which are essentially assumed. They are not often examined closely (if at all) because they have the special status of commonly held truths. Not common in the sense that they are base or full of superstition, but common in that they are either tacitly agreed, or it is agreed that it is permissible or even desirable to hold these beliefs. These beliefs vary from age to age. These patterns of belief change – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

We have, since the enlightenment in Europe, created a body of ideas which is designed to support  our world and its perspectives with a theoretical underpinning. That underpinning is, in broad terms, rationalism. We are by and large so sure of the rightness of our ways of thinking, particularly in the modern Western world, that we have now elevated rationalism to a place above all other perceptionsof the world, in the whole of history*.^[i]

This can be understood as the culmination of the rationalist and humanist agenda of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rationalists and humanists understood themselves to be struggling under the deadweight of accumulated belief and superstition, as well as the institutions and powers which drew their authority from the religious structures dominating the intellectual landscape. Drawing on the intellectual models of nature which developed during the seventeenth century, the rationalist perception of the world constantly sought to describe reality in terms of the laws of physics and mechanics. Nature became something which could be the subject of operations, rather than an outward expression of the mystery and character  of the divine. The latter construct was ignored. Descartes picture of the world shut this aspect of reality out as unneccessary for the analysis of the world, without significant argument in favour of this beyond the assertion that the world of the divine need not be invoked in order to explain the physical world.

The severing of this link had enormously beneficial results in terms of the development of the sciences in general – matters were simplified enormously if all that was being considered was what could be measured, counted and weighed; and there was no imponderable interference from the intrusion of the divine.

However it was not the case that the world of the divine had been shown to be of no account in the development of an understanding of nature – the exclusion of this aspect of reality was simply decreed, since it had been decided that it was unnecessary for our understanding of the natural world.

As the sciences progressed, the quality and power of the descriptive models of nature created supplied, for all practical purposes, the proof that a knowledge of the world of the divine was unneccessary for an understanding of nature. Thereafter, the divine became, in the world of the sciences, something to be scorned, as a relic of the days when the human race lived in a state of irrational superstition. The scientific and rational model of understanding nature then clarified its identity partly in opposition to the patterns of thought which it sought to escape. The next logical step was to try to supplant the models of the world in which the divine was deemed to function as creator or agent. This was in essence the eighteenth century enlightenment agenda.

After the eighteenth century, the idea of the divine and its associated technicalites became less and less interesting to study. In the early twenty-first century, it is a matter for the philosophical specialist working principally with materials created during the Christian era, or for the credulous. And within academia, the consideration of the divine outside this is verboten in close detail - though it may be studied in anthropological terms, in terms of social dynamics, or in terms of human pathology - for the simple reason that it is axiomatic that a philosophically grounded theology of the world dates only from the application and adaptation of Greek philosophical concepts in the creation of Christian theology in the first centuries of the modern era.

Christian theology has always appeared weak to the rationalist world by dint of its appropriation of Greek philosophical ideas for its intellectual support, since the enlightenment enterprise itself traces its own foundations to the Academy and the Lyceum. It is hard therefore to defend Christian theology against an argument coming from specialists in its own intellectual background.

However, a sophisticated, technical theology arriving from beyond the cultural arc stretching from Ancient Greece to the parlours and salons of the eighteenth century would be unwelcome to both rationalists and Christian theologians, since it might reframe the origins of both the rational world view and of Christianity. The hypothesis explored in this book is that just such a philosophical theology existed in the ancient world, and that it is, by close analysis of the evidence, possible for us to understand many of its details, as well as the intellectual background it provided to both the development of philosophy in Greece, and the origins of Christianity. 

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[i] in a manner reminiscent of the elevation of the Roman Republic above all other constitutional forms by Polybius, so that the Republic was not subject to the forces (it was understood) other states were subject to [the ancient world understood several models for state constitutions, and Aristotle had arranged them into a cycle. Rome fitted into this, but at some point they decided that they had transcended that cycle, and that (essentially) both Rome and its constitution were eternal].