Tag: christianity

In Our Time: Prophecy

Prophecy is an important facet of all three Abrahamic religions, but the interpretation of the role of prophecy (& who the prophets are) is different in each. The experts who talked about it on In Our Time were Mona Siddiqui (University of Edinburgh), Justin Meggitt (University of Cambridge) and Jonathan Stökl (Leiden University).

For the modern incarnations of the three religions the bulk of the prophets are those attested to in the Hebrew Bible. Stökl was the expert on Judaism on the panel and so he talked most about these prophets. Prophets are divinely inspired and are in communication with God without being divine themselves. Nowadays when we think of prophecy we think of predicting the future, but this was only one of the sorts of messages that prophets could pass on from God. They also provided more general advice for the rulers about matters that the divine had some bearing on. They pronounced on the validity of old texts, they advised the King when to or when not to undertake campaigns, they’d advise him if God wasn’t happy with how the country was being run. Stökl was also saying that some figures in the Bible were retroactively designated as prophets – that Moses, for instance, was a charismatic leader and then later in Judaic history when prophets are more important he’s designated a prophet.

In terms of predicting the future most if not all of the descriptions of this in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible were written after the events that were predicted – so “prophesying” after the fact. (And actually there are no written texts dating before 200 BC, which means we don’t know how it evolved before this.) It was a win-win situation for the prophets anyway – if they got it wrong, then either they had misunderstood what God told them or God had some reason for telling them the wrong thing. Not that they weren’t a prophet, or that God had got it wrong. Jeremiah was the example here – God told him to tell the people something that turned out to be false & this was because it set up the punishment that God was going to visit on the people for previous wrong doing. There are warnings in the texts about false prophets and discussions of punishments for this, but there are actually no records of this ever happening.

Meggitt was the expert on Christianity & he talked about the way that early Christianity used the Jewish prophets to legitimise their belief that Christ was the Son of God. Obviously the Christian tradition is that prophets weren’t really getting the message across, so God himself had to come to earth in the person of Christ. The way the Christian Bible has ended up being structured means that the Old Testament ends with prophecies that Elijah is going to return and proclaim the day of the Lord. Although this is in the Hebrew Bible the way it is structured means that this isn’t where the book ends. Meggitt was saying that there’s a strong sense that the authors of the New Testament were looking for the prophecies in the Old Testament and then making sure they could find a bit of the life of Christ to fit them. The narrative being created to reflect the prophecy rather than the prophecy predicting the narrative.

In the early church there were still people being referred to as prophets, but as the Church became more institutionalised the role of the prophet diminished & then vanished. Meggitt was saying this was because lone self-selected divinely inspired people don’t really fit in well with a hierarchical organised Church. Bragg brought up the Pentecostal Church which is a modern Christian tradition which has prophets – so it’s not something that’s completely absent from Christianity. Just that as with Judaism the bulk of the religion thinks that prophecy stopped some time ago.

Siddiqui talked about Islam & the role of prophets in that religion. She told us that from an Islamic perspective all the prophets including Mohammed were given the same message or revelation from God. This message is about the oneness and truth of God, and has needed to be repeated because people fall away from it or fail to understand it. The differences in what was passed on or written down by each prophet & their followers are due to the interpretation of the prophet themself & their cultural blinders & ability to understand the message. Mohammed was able to properly understand and pass on God’s revelation, so there’s no need for any more prophets after him. Siddiqui also mentioned a distinction between prophets and messengers in Islam – I think she was saying that all messengers are prophets, but not all prophets are messengers. There’s some debate about whether the Virgin Mary is a prophet in the non-messenger sense because she is sinless, and this is one of the criteria for a prophet.

The way I’ve written this up it looks a little disjointed, but actually they followed the usual round table format & drew out the comparisons between the three strands as well as the differences. Although at times I felt like Siddiqui wasn’t quite having the same conversation as everyone else.

Howard Goodall’s Story of Music; The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

We started watching two new series this week – both picked from the selection we have recorded because they’re in HD and our PVR is filling up! So we began with the first episode of Howard Goodall’s Story of Music. The format of the show is just a little different from what I’m used to with documentaries – instead of Goodall going out on location somewhere he’s in a studio and the programme cuts between location footage, singers in a studio/on location and Goodall. Sometimes he has a keyboard to play, sometimes there’s other bits of graphics to illustrate what he’s saying, but a lot of the shots of him are him standing there. Which makes for quite a different feel – which I rather like, variety is good.

In the introductory segment he pointed out that there are many ways to tell the story of music, but this one is his – and I think it was a good idea for him to be so upfront about that, because his biases were very apparent in this particular episode. He opened with a brief trot through pre-history and ancient history – the theme for this segment was that there’s evidence of music throughout the time that there’s been people, but we don’t know what it sounded like because there was no musical notation. In some cases we have discovered instruments (like Lurs from Denmark – curly horns, hence Lurpak Butter and their logo of two curly horns), but this only tells us the sorts of noises they could use to make music not what the music was like. And then he was on to his main subject – which was really the development and styles of Western music. And possibly only some of that, I’m not sure I believe that there was no popular or secular music before the troubadours in the 12th Century.

So we started the story proper with Gregorian Chant – plainsong initially, which is just one vocal line and all the voices singing that in unison. Then he talked us through the adding of harmonies – first adding boys to the choirs got you two lines an octave apart, then they thought about 5ths & 4ths. Then more interesting intervals (like thirds), and more lines (so you can do triads of root-third-fifth, for instance). And the different lines not just singing the same thing in parallel always the same distance apart, so chord progressions were developed.

In parallel he also talked about the development of the system for writing music down from its beginnings as a mnemonic scribbled above the words to a developed system that lets you know which note, for how long etc. And discussed the addition and development of instruments (and this showed his biases as well, because some of these came from the Arabic world so clearly the rest of the world is doing its own musical development, he’s just not telling us about it). Other developments included the change of which line holds the melody (originally the tenor line did – hence “tenor” because that’s derived from the latin for “to hold”), and changing how the tunes went with the words. By that last I mean that it became more important for the words to be understood (he used an example of a Savonarola prayer set to music where the words were a political statement, and also of hymns for the congregation or opera where the words tell you the story) – so the composers made them have fewer notes per syllable so you could more easily hear what’s going on.

And we finished up with Monteverdi’s first opera being performed in 1607 – which Goodall held up as the point at which all the pieces of the Western musical tradition were in place. The general rules of harmony, the instrumental accompaniment and so on.

While I enjoyed watching this programme I am not sure he’s always on the right side of the line between clear jargon-free explanations & patronising explanations – for instance calling the note representations for early music writing “squiggles” didn’t quite sit right with me (he did say they were properly called “neumes” but then continued to say “squiggles” instead). But maybe I’m being over-sensitive here 🙂

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Next we started watching The Dark Ages: An Age of Light which is a recent series about the art of the Early Medieval period – from the latter part of the Roman Empire up through to the time of the Norman Conquest. (He started with orientation dates! I approve 😉 ). This period has been characterised in the past as a time when civilisation ceased & people reverted to being barbarians – I don’t think anyone really thinks that any more but just in case you do this series aims to demonstrate that it’s a false idea. Over the series Januszczak is going to look at the art of various different groups of peoples, this first episode looks at the Christians – with an emphasis on the third & fourth centuries AD. I guess to partly start us with the familiar.

So first we looked at very early Christian art – the stuff you find in the early burials in the catacombs under Rome and (possibly) in Pompeii. This is mostly symbols rather than representations of Christ or other people. The fish, the anchor, the ☧ (Chi-Rho, from which we derive “xmas” for Christmas). Jonah being swallowed by the whale (or regurgitated by) as a symbol for Christ’s resurrection. The sort of thing that doesn’t jump up and shout “I’m a Christian” while waving its arms around, but does let other Christians know that & keeps it all more low key. Januszczak did make the point that the persecution of Christians wasn’t as complete as later tales suggest, but this use of symbolic art does suggest people were keeping it hidden as a matter of course.

I said “(possibly) in Pompeii” above – and I said this because there’s a reasonably long segment of the programme where he discusses the ROTAS squares found in Pompeii (so dating from AD79 or earlier) as a Christian symbol. A ROTAS square is inscribed like this:

R O T A S
O P E R A
T E N E T
A R E P O
S A T O R

And if you take all the letters and re-organise them you can make them into a cross constructed of two PATERNOSTER (crossing at the N) with A & O spare (twice). So that’s a cross, two Our Father’s and two lots of Α & Ω (or the beginning and the end). Which all sounds pretty Christian, and that’s how he was presenting it on the programme – a secret Christian symbol. But as Mary Beard discussed on her blog shortly after this programme aired, these days it’s thought not to be a Christian symbol – the argument is that it’s too early for the cross & the Α and Ω to be Christian symbols, they aren’t seen as such till the 3rd Century by which time Pompeii’s been under ash for over a hundred years. Also early Christians were much more likely to be using Greek letters rather than Latin ones. There’s no other evidence for Christians in Pompeii so it’s more likely that this is a Jewish symbol, as there’s plenty of evidence for Jews in Pompeii – and Our Father and Α and Ω show up in Jewish prayers & Jewish cultural contexts at this time.

So that’s a bit of a shame. J and I were also wincing at some of the description of the Egyptian goddess Isis later on in the programme, which taken together makes me concerned in general that whenever Januszczak says something I didn’t know before that perhaps that’s because it’s wrong. A programme to watch for the broad sweep of things & to look at the art, but not to learn the details.

Moving on, he started to talk about the earliest representations of Christ – these are not much like the later art, Christ is a boyish almost feminine figure with curly blonde hair & carries a staff or wand (with which he performs his miracles). Januszczak seemed to be both arguing that this was more likely to be realistic than the later bearded Jesus figures (being earlier, and showing the Turin Shroud to be fake as it has a typical medieval style Jesus face), and that it was based on the god Apollo. Obviously both are unlikely to be true – and actually I think I’d like to’ve seen him look at some of the Eastern Christian art of the same time period. Do they have Apollo-like Jesus figures? Or if not, what?

The later depictions of Jesus (by which I mean 4th Century here, after Constantine) shift to a more mature-looking man – one that wouldn’t be out of place as a senior member of Roman society. Which mirrors the shift from a small hidden cult to the imperial religion. The femininity of his form is also lost because that role has been taken on by Mary – her cult within Christianity starts up later than Christianity itself. This segment included the bit that we were wincing at – he discussed the Egyptian goddess Isis and was wrong in most of the details. However he might’ve been talking about the Isis cult within the Roman Empire (and neither of us know much about the details of that, or how it differs from the parent religion in Egypt). Anyway, the imagery of the Madonna and Child is so similar to that of Isis suckling Horus that it’s suggested that the one was modelled on the other as a way of bringing in a feminine side to the religion where there wasn’t before.

In parallel to looking at the paintings Januszczak also discussed the architecture of Christianity – the first churches were converted from rooms in people’s houses, and you wouldn’t know they were there from the outside. But as Christianity became the imperial religion it needed imperial style buildings both to show how important it was and to hold the larger numbers of worshippers. These were based on Roman basilicas, which were large halls in which public meetings were held. Christian basilicas moved the entrance to one of the narrow ends so that you walked in to face the altar in the apse at the other end (re-purposed from the place where a magistrate would sit). This left a large hall for the worshippers to congregate in and the priests to process through. Other Christian architecture of the time was smaller round buildings, built around a tomb. These were places for contemplation, as opposed to the larger & noisier basilicas. But over time the two forms were merged – the apse that the altar sat in in a basilica became larger and domed like a mausoleum at the end of the basilica. These grand buildings were decorated with fine art – including the more mature and senator-like Jesus images.

As with most programmes about art it’s worth watching just to see the various artworks, but I do wish I was more convinced that he was always getting the details right.

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Lost Kingdoms of South America; Rome: A History of the Eternal City

The last episode of Lost Kingdoms of South America looked at the Chimú people and their Kingdom of Chimor. They lived in the coastal areas of Peru from around 800AD through to 1400AD when they were conquered by the Incas. The coast of Peru is a desert broken up by river valleys created by the melt water from the Andes running down to the Pacific Ocean.

Cooper started the programme in the ruins of Chan Chan – the capital city of Chimor, which was fairly large & would’ve been inhabited by ~35,000 people at its peak. I’m not sure if this was just the people who lived inside the city (the elite in palaces, and the artisans in houses squeezed in between) or if it also included the poorer people who lived around the walled city & grew food etc. The city is now a tourist attraction & actually a lot of what you can see is reconstruction based on photos & drawings from the past.

The Chimú had arisen after the collapse of a preceding civilisation, the Moche. They grew from a small settlement to a medium sized kingdom on the basis of their irrigation works. Cooper spoke to an archaeologist who works on this, and he was saying that the biggest problem the Chimú faced was that “if all you do is add water to the desert, then you get nothing but wet desert”. Which made me giggle a bit, I liked the turn of phrase. Basically they had to bring in top soil from the river valleys as well as build canals. And unlike our canals which are built straight they built their canals with twists & turns to slow down the water & prevent it eroding the land so much.

The management skills that the culture had to develop to build up their irrigation systems translated well to the management of an empire, and the Chimú set out to conquer themselves one. One neat thing while watching this programme was that J & I had been talking just beforehand about something we’d seen a while ago about some other South American culture (the Lambayque people) and then it turned out they were one of the people’s the Chimú conquered. Cooper told us one reason the Chimú kept conquering was that each new monarch inherited the title from his or her predecessor, but the wealth was inherited by other members of the family. They had to make their own reputation to receive tribute, and the best way to do this was to conquer somewhere new & prove you were worth giving food & wealth to.

Before we watched this episode J & I had been laughing about how all the previous episodes had been dwelling on the happy, happy, hippy side of the cultures, and how all the cultures chosen had apparently got no or little hierarchy. But then this one was the complete opposite – the Chimú had a very strict hierarchy, and you couldn’t change the class you were born into. They even had it built into their creation legend – the commoners came from a copper egg, the women of the royal families came from silver egg, and the men of the royal families from a golden egg. The King was so important he walked on crushed Spondylus shells (which were even more valuable to the Chimú than gold).

And it seems that they practised human sacrifice, of children. The remains of some children between 10 & 14 years old, and in good health, have been found – each was bound and then had their chests cut open & the ribcage forced open. So here we’re back to the gruesome sorts of things one thinks of about Mesoamerican & South American cultures – like the Aztecs & the Incas. The sacrifices were probably due to the extreme weather events that the Chimú land suffered – during an el Niño year the desert can experience extraordinarily heavy rainfall. Around the time the child sacrifices were made there is a band of clay (wet desert!) in the strata, indicating a particularly bad spell of this sort of rainfall.

Overall this was a good series & Jago Cooper is a good presenter. I enjoyed seeing the remains of the different cultures & the scenery of the places they lived – and I thought they did well with emphasising both the differences between the sorts of lives these various people’s lived & our own, and with making them feel like real people. Perhaps a bit too much emphasis on the happy, happy hippy thing in some of the episodes (particularly the one about the Tiwanaku).

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We finished off two series this week, because the third episode of Rome: A History of the Eternal City was also the last. This covered the 600 years or so of Rome’s history – at a gallop! It started where it left off last time – with the Papacy leaving Rome to take up residence in Avignon. Montefiore told us how St. Catherine of Siena was so horrified about the Papacy not being in Rome that she wrote several letters practically commanding the Pope to return, and then eventually travelled to Avignon herself and brought the Pope back.

During the Renaissance the Popes and the elite families of Rome indulged themselves in decadent & lavish palaces full of works of art. This is the time of the Borgia Popes, and the time of Michaelangelo etc. And even the Papal residences began mingling classical pagan themes with Christian themes in their decoration. To add to all this expensive building & decoration Pope Julius II (chosing his papal name partly in honour of Julius Caesar) decided it was time St. Peter’s Basilica was rebuilt in a suitable style. To pay for these works the Church sold indulgences – forgiveness for your sins (even the ones you hadn’t committed yet). And this is what so incensed Martin Luther that he kicked off the Reformation.

Because the subject of this series is Rome Montefiore then told us about the counter Reformation – the Catholic Church’s own answer to the excesses of the Renaissance. Although that didn’t mean giving up the lavish art habit – Pope Fig Leaf as Montefiore said he’s remembered (real name Pope Clement XIII) just had them paint over the genitalia in the Renaissance art so the paintings were more modest. And Montefiore went to a church which had a large Baroque statue of the Ecstasy of St. Theresa which might have everyone clothed, but it’s still spectacular & lavish & sensuous.

Montefiore moved us pretty briskly through the rest of Rome’s history picking out just a detail here & there. The sack of Rome by unpaid mercenaries at the end of the Reformation period was used to highlight the ludicrousness of a more modern Pope’s flouncing about being “practically a prisoner” when he wasn’t nearly so threatened (personally or physically). But the threat was still there as this was the end of the Church’s domination of Rome – the fascist Mussolini dealt the death blow when he confined the Pope’s authority to the area of the Vatican State, and the rest of Rome was then under secular Italian rule. And that’s pretty much where we left the story.

I did enjoy this series, but it felt very rushed to fit the whole three millennia into 3 episodes. Even though the theme was the religious history of Rome it felt a bit too much like a history of the papacy for the last couple of episodes.

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Lost Kingdoms of South America; Rome: A History of the Eternal City

The third episode of Lost Kingdoms of South America was about El Dorado – and the cultures that might’ve been the truth behind this Spanish legend. The legend as we know it today is about a golden city, but the original Spanish writers talk about a man who scatters gold dust over himself “as if it were salt” and washes it off in a sacred lake – a man who regards the wearing of solid gold ornaments as “vulgar”.

The culture that probably gave rise to these legends are the Muisca who lived in southern Colombia until around 1600AD. They were a couple of loose confederations of villages covering quite a large area – no single leader for the whole group, but they shared a culture. There’s DNA evidence from burials that’ve been excavated which shows that the elite were not a hereditary caste – the burials with lots of grave goods aren’t more related to each other than they are to the burials without grave goods. The archaeologist telling us about this bit said they also didn’t use violence to determine who had power, but I’m not sure what he was basing that on.

They didn’t appear to regard gold as valuable in itself, nor did they wear gold ornaments. Gold is also not found on Muisca lands. But they did trade salt they mined from their land for gold from other peoples – and they ascribed spiritual significance to it and used it to make offerings to their gods. Cooper spoke to a man whose people carried on some of the ancient traditions and their stories tell that one of the rituals took place on a sacred lake, and this could well be the source of the El Dorado legend.

The form of their offerings (well, the ones that have survived) were little flat figures, each one uniquely decorated. They were made by the lost wax method of casting, where first you make a wax model of the thing you want to make, then you encase it in clay and fire that (so that the wax evapourates) and then pour in the molten metal. When it sets, you break it out of the mould. Cooper visited a man who makes replicas of these today, which was kinda neat – he used a blowtorch to melt the gold 🙂 The figurines are distinctive not just in decoration but because they don’t really seem finished – as they were never worn or displayed they haven’t been polished and there are still rough edges from breaking it out of the mould.

Cooper also talked about the Tairona culture who lived in north eastern Colombia on the Caribbean coast. They were a culture that had a common ancestral language & culture with the Muisca, that had originated in Mesoamerica. The Tairona also put spiritual significance on gold, but expressed this differently – their gold ornaments were very different in style (including reclining bat-men as fertility symbols) and they were finished & polished. Their significance was to do with their shininess, and other shiny things were also spiritually significant. There are descendents of the Tairona still living in Colombia today, and still living in traditional villages – there was a segment of the programme in one of their villages with Cooper talking to one of the few of the villagers who spoke Spanish.

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The second episode of Rome: A History of the Eternal City covered the rise & fall of Christian Rome from the beginnings of Christianity until the Popes left Rome for France in the 14th Century. At the beginnings of Christianity’s presence in Rome it was just another one of the many small cults that had sprung up in the empire (like the Mithras cult we listened to an In Our Time about the other day). The thing that set Christianity apart was that Christians refused to make the proper sacrifices to the state gods (like the Emperor) and so when scapegoats were needed it was easy to see them as unpatriotic. So they were persecuted and their deaths were often public spectacles – especially during the reign of Diocletian.

This changed when the Emperor Constantine won an impressive victory after ordering his soldiers to display the sign of the cross. After this he tolerated, and promoted, Christianity within the western Roman Empire – even converting himself on his death bed. One of the things Montefiore showed us in the programme was one of the relics that the Emperor’s mother brought from Jerusalem to Rome. I knew she’d brought what she thought to be the cross that Jesus was crucified on to Rome, but I hadn’t known she’d brought a staircase back with her! This is apparently the staircase that Jesus walked up on the way to his trial by Pontius Pilate, and even today pilgrims come to go up it on their knees so that they have touched the place that Jesus put his feet.

St Peter (one of the apostles) was one of the early Christian martyrs in Rome – the obelisk he was crucified in front of still stands outside the church that was built over his tomb (St Peter’s Basilica). The Roman bishops used this link with St Peter to strengthen their position in the church – saying that they were better than other bishops because they were the successors of an apostle. Montefiore showed us the tombs of the early bishops of Rome, which have their title “Papa” which as their status increased gradually became the title of the supreme head of the (latin) Church.

The programme covered the next thousand or so years pretty quickly, dwelling on just a few stories. The first of these was the fall of Rome – sacked by the barbarians, who were actually also Christians (albeit of a different type). And another was the period around the 10th Century which is sometimes called the Pornocracy (it really is! or at least wikipedia agrees with my recollection of the programme). This was a scandalous period with a family that makes the Borgia legend seem tame – one of the key figures was a woman who was the lover of at least one Pope, had at least one Pope murdered and made sure her son (by a Pope) was raised to be Pope himself. Other Popes of the time were related to her family as well – one was her grandson.

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“A History of Christianity” Diarmaid MacCulloch

I think I’ve been reading this book off and on for most of the year, which is an awfully long time for me to take to read a book! It’s subtitled “The First Three Thousand Years” which gives you a hint of the scale of it. Over the thousand pages in the book it covers the development and history of Christianity across the whole world from the Jewish and Greek underpinnings of the time and place that Jesus was born into right up to the beginning of the 21st Century. Given it doesn’t just cover the history (both of the Church and of the time period in general) but also goes into the various theological developments (and arguments and schisms) through the history of the Church, it ends up a very information dense book. Which I knew it would be going in, I’ve read a previous book by MacCulloch about the Reformation which was similarly pitched. This is part of why it took me so long to read – I needed to be in the right frame of mind to digest it properly 🙂 But despite this it was a clearly written & readable book, and I should read it again sometime.

Because it took me so long I’ve not got a good grasp of the whole thing in my head any more but I am still attempting to write a summary of sorts (and I really wish I’d written up notes after each section, I have a plan to do that with future books, writing about what I’ve read helps solidify it in my head). It opens with a couple of chapters that set the scene – a brief history of the Greeks & their philosophy (and their conquest by & absorption into the Roman Republic), followed by a brief history of Israel & the Jewish religion & philosophy. The next chapter deals with what can be teased out of the Gospels about the historical person of Jesus, and the immediate aftermath of his crucifixion – in terms of what happened in the very early Church, which at the time was really a branch of Judaism. The separation of Christianity from its Jewish roots comes with Paul (who isn’t one of the original disciples), and with the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD which disrupted the still Jewish leaning part of Christianity.

Historical accident or circumstance plays a large role in the early development of the Church, in contrast to later on when the Church has a hand in creating the political history (in Europe, anyway). At first the centre of gravity of the Church was towards the east of the Mediterranean – Egypt, Syria, and even further east to Baghdad & beyond were important centres of Christianity. The westward shift comes from the intertwining of the Church in Rome with the Roman Empire, and then the later rise of Islam in the Middle East which marginalises those Christian communities. Latin & Orthodox Christianity become dominant not because they’re closer to the original (they really aren’t) but because they get political power and hook themselves into the state apparatus of the Roman Empire & its successors.

A common theme through the whole history of the Church is schisms based on arguments about what the stories in the Bible mean, and what they should teach us to believe & how they should teach us to behave. This starts right at the beginning with Paul and his not-necessarily-Jewish form of Christianity (that ended up completely dominating) and James the brother of Jesus, whose Christianity was a flavour of Judaism. There are splits over the nature of Jesus (both divine and human, but is that mixed or separate within the body of Christ?), splits over the concept of the Trinity, splits over whether icons are permitted or prohibited, splits over the meaning of the Eucharist (literally magical or metaphor), splits over who is in charge (Pope vs monarchs, priests vs elders), splits over the construction of the afterlife (purgatory? or not?), splits over free will or predestination. And more. It seems a bit like every possible stand one can take about the nature of God and of the message that Jesus was preaching, someone has taken and has proclaimed to be a revelation directly from God.

Another strand running throughout the history of Christianity is the imminent arrival of the end of the world. Jesus and his early followers were expecting the End to begin during their own lifetimes – his message was an apocalyptic one. One of the re-adjustments necessary in the mainstream Church after this was a move away from a literal interpretation of the end as nigh to a more metaphorical one where it is “soon” in the time of God not necessarily in human terms. But the idea keeps returning, time and time again various sects and parts of the Church have begun to believe that the End will come in their lifetimes, and time and time again it hasn’t. It has survived even into modern times, affecting the political landscape – there is apparently a significant strand of support for the Israeli state that comes from a belief that a Jewish homeland is a necessary pre-requisite for the second coming of Christ. (As an aside, I find it a bit mind-boggling that people are out there trying to encourage the right conditions for the end of the world, I guess if you “know” you’re going to go straight to heaven in the Rapture maybe you have a different perspective, but I just don’t really understand the point of view that thinks “hey, everyone & everything will die if we just get things organised like this, let’s go do it!”.)

The book ends on an optimistic note for the future of the Church – the secularisation of Europe gives an impression that numbers of Christians are dwindling and it’s dying out, but globally speaking this is not the case. Two of the growth areas that he talks about are South Korea and Africa, the latter being particularly surprising because you might’ve thought that Christianity would be linked to colonialism and thus not popular with the African peoples. But instead they have developed their own forms of Christianity, derived from but different to the Western Christianities they’ve grown out of.

Andrew Marr’s History of the World; In Search of Medieval Britain

Started off the evening with the third episode of Andrew Marr’s History of the World – this one was about the Word and the Sword, basically the rise and spread of Buddhism, Christianity & Islam with a few side stories. He started off with the story of Ashoka who killed and conquered his way to ruling an empire that covers most of modern India. But then after witnessing the appalling slaughter he himself had caused he converted to Buddhism and spent the rest of his (long) reign promoting peace and tolerance throughout his land and actively spread Buddhism as a religion.

The first of the side stories was about the First Emperor of China – who came to power around the same time as Ashoka and in much the same murderous way. But he had no moment of conversion, instead ruling his newly unified China with an iron fist. His mausoleum is apparently enormous – the only part that has been excavated is the Terracotta Army, but there’s a palace extending back beneath the hill behind where that lies. After his death (of mercury poisoning from an “elixir of immortality” which was anything but) the Han Dynasty ruled over China for about the same time period as the Roman Empire existed – and this was the next topic.

Well, sort of. What he actually covered was the final fall of Egypt, Cleopatra & Caesar’s relationship and then their deaths (skipping quite quickly over the Mark Anthony bit) and Egypt’s assimilation into the Roman Empire. The spin he was putting on this was that Caesar effectively saw that Cleopatra was worshipped as a god in Egypt and thought this was a good idea so went home to Rome to do the same. Leading to the Senate not being happy and murdering him (but actually all his successors were worshipped as gods, so the idea took hold). And then he cast the rise of Christianity as being partly a reaction against this politicised religion in the empire, people going back to a faith in something that was more personal to them. This wasn’t quite the spin I was expecting, so it ended up feeling like he’d kinda skewed things to make it fit his theme for the programme.

Early Christianity through to its establishment as the religion of the Roman Empire was told through the lens of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and his subsequent spreading of the gospel throughout the empire, and Perpetua’s imprisonment and martyrdom for her faith. And ending with the Romans having effectively assimilated the faith into their political & military structures.

The feeling of stretching to fit the theme was not helped by the next side-story which really did seem shoehorned in. We had a brief trip across to the Americas, and the Nazca people. These are the people who made the massive line drawings on their land, and their civilisation collapsed around 600AD due to human exacerbated environmental disaster. Basically they were cutting down trees to create more arable land, but then when they had 30 years of excessive rain the lack of trees meant the soil was washed away. Which made the succeeding 30 years of drought even less survivable than it otherwise would’ve been. This didn’t really fit the theme, but it happened in this time period so they told us about it anyway, with some reference to the religion and the increased numbers of human sacrifices during the end of the civilisation as they frantically tried to appease their gods.

And then it was back to the theme – with the meteoric rise and spread of Islam. They did another good job of juxtaposing the stories told to highlight the similarities between the different topics. In this case we had the almost martyrdom of Bilal to mirror Perpetua’s martyrdom as the entry point for the story of early Islam. Bilal survived, however, to become the first muezzin. And the spread of Islam by conquest was contrasted with the slower spread of Christianity by the travels of the Paul and the Apostles.

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We were running late this week, so only had time for a half hour programme for the second one of the evening. We have had a couple of episodes from the middle of a series called In Search of Medieval Britain sitting on the PVR for ages, so we watched one of them. The premise of this series is Alixe Bovey (a lecturer in medieval history at Kent) travelling about the country following the Gough Map (a map dating to 1355-1366 which was donated to the Bodleian Library in 1809). In the episode we watched she visited Melton Mowbray, Lincoln and Sherwood Forest. In Melton Mowbray she helped make an authentic pork pie from the era. In Lincoln she visited the cathedral, which for 200 years held the title of tallest building in the world. Then the spire fell down in the 1500s (probably because the wood frame rotted) and it was no longer taller than the Great Pyramid. It was still the tallest point in Lincolnshire though. And finally in Sherwood Forest she told us about real outlaws (who were a much more murderous and unpleasant bunch than the fictional Robin Hood), and visited the oldest pub in the country. She also talked to some people who were making authentic medieval beer – with hissop instead of hops as the bittering agent. It was amusing to see her not drink any on camera, the “oh it’s delicious” after the camera panned away from her was pretty fake I think 😉

I wish we’d managed to record all of these, this one was quite fun 🙂

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In Our Time: The Written Word Part 3

This third part of the series on the Written Word was covering how books and writing helped the spread of global religions during the first millennium AD. And also how the needs of the religions helped spread literacy & printing. It was split into 3 sections – covering Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Common to all three is the way that once the words are written down it’s easier for prospective converts to find out about the religion in question, so it’s easier for it to spread. And also theologians can more easily debate & discuss the finer points of detail if those details are written down and the same for everyone.

Christian writings have been in the form of bound codices from early on. This format was partly used because of the desire to restrict what was canon in the scriptures – so if you had your bound copy of the Bible then you had the books that you were supposed to and no more or less.

In Islam the tradition is that the Prophet Mohammed was illiterate, and thus the teachings in the Koran were initially preserved orally and subsequently written down by scribes. Writing has a dual significance – in the temporal world it was used pre-Islam for contracts and other things where the details needed to be fixed, and this is why the Koran was written down. In the spiritual sense it is also a metaphor for how Allah fixes what is happening in creation.

And Buddhism helped to drive the invention of printing in China. The belief is that there is virtue in repetition – making repeated images of the Buddha will gain you merit, for instance. So writing down the teachings of Buddhism and printing multiple copies of them will not just provide people with their own copy of the text but is inherently a religious undertaking.

Incidentally, I’m always mildly surprised that radio shows like this work – you can’t see anything obviously, but the experts & Bragg describe things and you can normally visualise them and understand the point of what’s going on.

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