The Nazarene Gospel Restored

A response to an email inquiry about Robert Graves book 'The Nazarene Gospel Restored'. It dates from November 1999, and has been missing from the web for several years. The book has been reissued by Carcanet (2010), and edited by John Presley, though it is not currently available from them. However the reissue means that it is a little easier to find than it was. Its page is at: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781857546675. There is a review of this edition by Peter Costello from 2011, at: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?showdoc=1184;doctype=review



Thomas Yaeger, November 20, 2020.





Subject: The Nazarene Gospel Restored

Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 22:01:29 +0100
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>I'm interested in finding "The Nazarene Gospel Restored"
>which I have been searching for a long time.
>I think it is part of a trilogy he wrote along
>with "King Jesus" and "Jesus in Rome". So far my
>search has been unsuccessful. I'd appreciate
>any information about this book.

The Nazarene Gospel Restored (published by Cassell, London, 1953; and Doubleday in New York, 1954) is one of the most difficult (but not *the* most difficult) of Graves' works to find. Estimates as to how many were printed vary: the largest estimate I have come across is 5,000 copies in all. I have seen only two copies for sale, one in Oxford, and the other in London, and I now own one of those. You may eventually find a copy through one of the specialist book dealers listed on the appropriate page of the Robert Graves Archive, or you may find it by pure chance (as I did). However, the book is available in academic libraries (there is a copy in the Mocatta Library at University College, London, for example), and it is also scheduled for republication in the Carcanet 'Robert Graves Programme' series in a couple of years.

It is not, as you suggest, part of a formal trilogy. The book deals with much of the same New Testament material, but it was written significantly later than King Jesus (which was published in 1946 by Cassell), and with the assistance of his co-author, Joshua Podro, a skilled Hebraicist and Biblical scholar. King Jesus by contrast leans heavily in the direction of the researches which produced The White Goddess: there is a good deal in the novel about Graves' ideas of the sacred king, and also the tree alphabet, for example, which does not reappear in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, though Graves had made the aquaintance of Joshua Podro by the time he came to write King Jesus.

Jesus in Rome is, like The Nazarene Gospel Restored, not a work of fiction, and also co-authored with Joshua Podro (published by Cassell in 1957). It might be regarded as an extended addendum to the earlier study of the Gospels.

One of the most interesting of the speakers at the August 1995 Centenary Conference in Oxford was Hyam Maccoby. He was there principally to acknowledge his indebtedness to Graves' work in the area of New Testament studies. Maccoby contributed a paper to the first issue of Gravesiana (June 1996) which was based on what he had to say at the 1995 conference, titled: 'Robert Graves and the Nazarene Gospel Restored'.Maccoby explains that:

In King Jesus, the main preoccupation of Jesus is to combat the Goddess. His death is the revenge of the Goddess, whose reign he has challenged in the name of Jehovah, the patriarchal God. All this has disappeared in The Nazarene Gospel Restored. Instead, Jesus is simply an apocalyptic Jew, whose aim is to fulfil the prophecies of the Old Testament about the coming of a human liberating Messiah, and thereby [to] release his people from slavery to Rome. His death comes about not in combat with the Goddess, but with the imperial power of Rome.

Maccoby also throws light on the poor reception accorded to The Nazarene Gospel Restored, pointing out that

From the standpoint of New Testament scholarship, The Nazarene Gospel Restored belongs to ... the Tuebingen school founded by F. C. Baur. This school of thought builds on the insight that the early Christian Church was split into two warring factions, the Jerusalem Church (sometimes called the Petrine Church) and the Pauline, or Gentile Church. ....The Jewish-Christians of the Jerusalem Church, on this view, regarded themselves as part of the general Jewish community, not as a new religion. They saw Jesus as a human Messiah... who never claimed divinity.... The Pauline Church on the other hand, had turned Jesus from a Jewish messiah into a Hellenistic saviour-god, substituting mystical identification with the death of the god for the Jewish belief in the revelation on Mount Sinai.. 

.

The Tuebingen theory was strongly opposed at the time. Maccoby argues that 'part of the opposition to The Nazarene Gospel Restored arose from the indignant conviction that Graves and Podro do were reverting to dangerous theories that had been safely scotched.' Maccoby also indicates that more recent scholars have brought new evidence to bear, showing that the split between Paul and Peter has a real basis, and mentions in particular S.G.F. Brandon.

The implication of the Tuebingen argument is that important political aspects of the life of Jesus and the activities of the various religious groups mentioned in the gospels have been downplayed, distorted, or even removed from the texts. Graves view was that 'many of the incidents in the Gospels have to be "despiritualised" in order to arrive at their historical meaning'. Paul made Jesus acceptable to Rome by depoliticising his life, and avoiding 'all awareness of Jesus as a claimant to the Jewish throne'.

The book is also short on the kind of scholarly apparatus one might expect in a work of New Testament exegesis. This has led some readers of the book to doubt that Graves worked from a base of thorough knowledge of his sources. Maccoby argues that the contrary is true, a fact which was shown by the libel action taken out against the Times Literary Supplement, which had published a hostile anonymous review. This review 'was followed by a correspondence in which the reviewer accused Graves of deliberately falsifying the Greek of a New Testament text. Graves was able to show that his textual scholarship was far superior to that of the reviewer, who had failed to take into account some important textual variations. The TLS eventually published an apololgy and the libel action was never taken to court'. Original sources are cited fully, but Graves was reluctant to become involved in dull exchanges with the views of other scholars: the consequence is that it has been too easy for scholars to dismiss the importance of the book.

***

Page first mounted 13 November 1999.

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