Tag: religion

In Our Time: Josephus

Josephus was a Jewish and Roman historian in the 1st Century AD who wrote (amongst other things) about the Roman-Jewish war that lead to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. In the 18th Century this book was widely read by Christians as it appears to provide historical evidence for Jesus; and Josephus was held up as one of the great historians. However to Jews he was a much more controversial figure and wasn’t read or referred to until much later in the Enlightenment. Talking about Josephus’s life, times and legacy on In Our Time were Tessa Rajak (University of Reading), Philip Alexander (University of Manchester) and Martin Goodman (University of Oxford and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies).

They started the programme with some context for the Jewish-Roman war. In the 2nd & 1st Century BC under the rulership of the Maccabees Judah had become independent. During this period it had formed a sense of itself as a Jewish nation, and so when it became a province in the Roman Empire Judah didn’t assimilate into the Empire as well as the Romans would’ve liked. To some extent the province had a special status – they had a bit more independence than was generally the case. The Jews & their religion were well treated and the Herods ruled as client kings of the Romans. However there was a strand of thought within Judean society that they should be independent, and this was particularly pronounced in the priestly classes and the elite.

Josephus was born in 37AD to a family in Jerusalem who were members of the priestly elite. He was highly intelligent and well educated. Stories about his education have parallels to the stories told about Jesus’s education – the bright boy who quickly surpasses his teachers in knowledge and understanding of the scriptures. When the Jewish-Roman War broke out in 66AD he, along with many other intelligent educated sons of the priestly elite, became a general. He had no experience in leading troops, nor did his fellow generals. Unsurprisingly the war is a disaster for the Jews, and the Romans quickly put down what they see as a rebellion of one of their provinces. However, it’s important to remember that most of what we know about this war comes from Josephus. And he wrote about it after the fact when he had become Romanised and for a Roman audience. So his bias is against the Jews.

Josephus doesn’t entirely whitewash his own actions in the war when he’s writing about it. One of the stories he tells reflects badly (by the standards of his community) on him – possibly he only tells it because it was widely known and so better to put his own spin on it rather than miss it out completely. During the war he was leading troops who were holding out against a siege, but they were losing. The acceptable thing to do in these circumstances was to commit suicide rather than surrender, and this is what the others want to do. Technically it’s not suicide – each man is to kill another until there is only one left who will commit suicide. Josephus tries to talk his troops out of this, but fails. Eventually there are only two people left, Josephus and one other, and finally Josephus succeeds in talking this other man into surrendering rather than dying. This failure to pursue the honourable path is one of the things that shaped Josephus’s later legacy amongst the Jews.

When he surrenders Josephus is captured by Vespasian and taken to Rome as a slave. He tells Vespasian that he has had a vision that Vespasian will become Emperor – which at the time seems extremely unlikely. However, two years later this comes to pass. This little story needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt as the only sources for the vision and timing of the revelation of said vision are Vespasian and Josephus who both have vested interests in it being true.

Josephus worked for Vespasian as a scholar and interpreter, first as a slave and later as a Roman citizen. He wrote a history of the Jewish-Roman War, which is one of the books that he is remembered for. This was written for a Roman audience, and so it was tailored to please his masters and his potential customers for the book. For instance Josephus justifies his defection to Rome by saying that he believes God has withdrawn his blessing from the Jews and it has passed to the Romans. He does also explain the Jewish side of the war and this theme is taken up again in a later book about Jewish history, laws and customs. This is again written with his Roman audience in mind, and is a thorough explanation of his home culture to the people of his new culture.

Josephus’s legacy is two-fold. Amongst early & medieval Christians he was revered as a historian, in large part because there is a passage in the Jewish history book which refers to Jesus. This would be the earliest historical (i.e. non-Biblical) reference to Jesus and was tremendously important to Christian readers of his books. The experts all agreed that this reference was almost certainly inserted into the text in the 3rd Century AD by a Christian bishop. It’s possible that there was some stub of a reference to Jesus but not the longer description and reference to his Christian followers that is in the version that we now know. The originals of his works did fall into obscurity but in the 18th Century were rediscovered and re-translated. And at that time his history books were widely read by ordinary Christians.

His legacy amongst the Jews was much less positive. He was remembered as a traitor – both for failing to commit suicide when he should’ve and for later becoming a Roman citizen (and for his belief that God had changed his mind about who His chosen people were). As a result his books were not much read by the Jews, and were not translated into Hebrew. However much later, in the Enlightenment, there was a shift in attitude to the story of Judaism in some parts of the Jewish community. Some wanted their history told in the new scientific style of the Enlightenment era, which was quite a change from the Rabbinical tradition (which is fairly ahistorical). Josephus’s works are a good source for what Judaism was like before the Temple was destroyed. They also provide perspective on the immediate impact of the Temple’s destruction – as at the time it was assumed it was a temporary setback, not the permanent disaster hindsight showed it to be.

In Our Time: Matteo Ricci and the Ming Dynasty

Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit priest who went to China in the 16th Century with the aim of converting the Chinese to Christianity. He wasn’t particularly successful in that goal, but he was influential on European attitudes to China & vice versa. Discussing him and his mission on In Our Time were Mary Laven (University of Cambridge), Craig Clunas (University of Oxford) and Anne Gerritsen (University of Warwick).

Ricci was born in the Papal States and educated by the Jesuits up to university age. He then went to Rome to study to become a lawyer, but soon decided to become Jesuit priest instead. The Jesuits were a fairly new order at the time, part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The central difference between them and the other orders was that they were directly obedient to the Pope. They vowed to travel wherever they were sent, making them more mobile than the monastic orders. Their raison d’être was to convert the world to Catholicism – as part of showing the superiority of their branch of the faith over the Protestant variant.

The Jesuits saw China as a chance to replicate the success of the conversion of South America, with a hope that perhaps they might even replicate the Spanish conquest of South America. Europeans at the time were aware of China, but it wasn’t a particularly well known country nor was it understood. Before the Ming Dynasty came to power (in 1368AD) there had started to be some trade and contact between Yuan China and Europe (c.f. Marco Polo, who I’m sure we listened to an In Our Time about but I can’t find a post writing about it). However when the Hongzhu Emperor came to power & founded the Ming Dynasty trade with the outside world was forbidden. In practice this didn’t stop contact between China and Europe, but it did reduce it significantly.

Ricci’s over-arching strategy was a tried and tested one for the Catholic Church, although he took some of it to further extremes that his superiors were happy with. His aim was to integrate himself into Chinese society and to make contact with the elite – the idea was that if you can convert the top (the Emperor in this case) then you will convert the whole country. Another part of the strategy was to make accommodations for the current beliefs of the people when explaining Christianity to them, to make it sound not so far from their pagan religion. The theological rationale for this was God had left “hints” in the pagan faiths so that the Catholics would be able to convert the pagans. And then presumably after converting the country the idea would be to tighten up the theology, but Ricci didn’t get anywhere near that far in the process.

When Ricci first entered the country the Buddhist faith seemed like a good point of entry to hook in his audience – so he dressed like a Buddhist monk, and his teaching made analogies to Buddhism. However as he slowly progressed through the country to Beijing he came to realise that Confucianism was more important in Chinese culture, and so began to dress like a Confucian scholar. He learnt Chinese, and invented a romanisation system so that he could write the words down for other Europeans to learn from.

His role as an analogue of a Confucian scholar dovetailed nicely with his purpose as a missionary – he met with Confucian mandarins to discuss philosophy and other learned subjects. One point of entry into scholarly society was his creation of a world map – he tactfully put China in the centre, flanked by Europe and the Americas. This was interesting to the Chinese as they didn’t know much about either Europe or the Americas, and let Ricci start talking about the Pope and Christianity too. He also translated books between Latin and Chinese so that knowledge flowed both ways between the cultures.

Ricci was successful in working his way across the country and in meeting the elite of Chinese society. He eventually was able to enter the Forbidden Palace and “meet” the Emperor – this wasn’t an actual meeting, the Emperor didn’t do such things, but Ricci was able to meet senior officials and courtiers (and eunuchs) several times. From the Emperor’s perspective this was part of the normal diplomatic business – a foreigner arriving to pay his respects to the Emperor and tell him how wonderful he was. There was not the chance that Ricci had hoped for to interest the Emperor in Christianity.

Ricci used the accommodations strategy that the Church endorsed, but took it much further than his superiors would’ve preferred. He wrote a book in Chinese comparing Christianity and Confucianism in order to point out how similar they were. And in this book the life, death and resurrection of Christ were relegated to a sort of footnote – covered in a single paragraph near the end. When the Pope eventually found out about this demotion of such a crucial part of the Christian faith he was not pleased with Ricci.

The biggest stumbling block for the conversion of the Chinese was the Christian insistence on exclusivity – the Chinese culture was very tolerant of multiple religions and generally people would use appropriate rituals from more than one religion during the course of their lives. The Christian idea that you should just worship one God was alien to them. While Ricci did have some small success in converting people (not that many tho) they didn’t always give up their other rituals and observances. Long after Ricci’s death this was to cause tension between the Pope and the Chinese Emperor. The Pope had discovered that Chinese Catholics were still honouring their ancestors in the Confucian fashion, and forbade this. And the Chinese Emperor unsurprisingly saw this as foreign interference in the governance of China.

Ricci remained in China until he died, and was honoured after death by the Emperor granting permission for his burial in Beijing (rather than in the designated foreigners’ graveyard). Whilst he wasn’t the only member of the Catholic mission to China he was the person who had the most influence. His grave has been a tourist attraction in Beijing from the time of his burial through to the present day.

In Our Time: Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali was a leading intellectual in the Islamic world of the 11th Century AD, a philosopher, lawyer, teacher, thinker and mystic who made important contributions to Islamic philosophy and to sharia law. The experts on In Our Time who discussed his life and work were Peter Adamson (LMU in Munich), Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities) and Robert Gleave (University of Exeter).

The era in which Al-Ghazali lived was one of political change. The caliphate was beginning to collapse, and the Christian Crusaders were fighting for and conquering parts of the Middle East. There was a rump of the old Umayyad caliphate in Spain, and their Abbasid replacement had for a while been a figurehead government with the Shi’ite military holding the actual power. When Al-Ghazali was alive the Shi’ites were in control in Egypt, but the Sunnis had restored the caliphate to actual power in the east (where Al-Ghazali lived). This was an intellectually rich era, with many important and influential scholars. An important piece of context for Al-Ghazali’s life and work is that he was born when the translation movement had just finished its project of translating the works of the Greek philosophers into Arabic.

Al-Ghazali was born in the 11th Century in Persia and was of humble origins. He was orphaned, and so doesn’t receive his education because of his family connections – instead he is identified as being particularly clever. He was educated in all the subjects that an Islamic intellectual of the era should be – including the Qu’ran and Sharia law. He clearly excelled as when he moves to Baghdad in 1090 he soon gets the best job in the city, when he is still only 33. During the 5 years he lives in Baghdad he is the most senior person in the biggest mosque in the city. His primary duty is teaching, but the role is also a political one – for instance he wrote a tract rebuking the Shi’ite rulers of Egypt.

During his time in Baghdad he writes a work called The Incoherence of the Philosophers which is a rebuttal of the use of Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers in Islamic religious philosophy. this sets him in direct opposition to the leading thinker of the previous generation. The main thrust of his argument is that the Greek notions of causality leave no room for the actions of God in the world. For example if you hold a flame to cotton then the Greek philosophers would say that the fire causes the cotton to burn. But Al-Ghazali believes you need to leave space for God and for miracles. So it is God that causes the cotton to burn when the flame is held to it, and God could choose that the cotton doesn’t burn (i.e. a miracle would occur).

Al-Ghazali was also influential in the field of Sharia law. His work on this topic was philosophical in nature and focussed on the principles behind the laws. These are more important than the details of the laws themselves because an understanding of the principle behind a law will allow the law to be adapted to the changing realities of the world.

After he had been in Baghdad for five years he suffered some sort of breakdown. He left the city and his high status job and wandered as a Sufi mystic. Sufism is focussed on a direct personal and mystical connection with God, and this contrasts with mainstream Islam (which focusses on obedience to the laws). Although he lived a life outside the teaching structure of Islam he continued to publish on philosophical matters – now within the Sufi tradition. At the time Sufism was not very closely aligned with the rest of Islamic thought and it was Al-Ghazali’s work in this part of his life that brought it and mainstream Islam closer together.

In their summing up at the end of the programme the experts said that although a lot of his writing concerned philosophy (and he played an important role at the time) his lasting legacy is in the field of Sharia law.

In Our Time: Ashoka

Ashoka was the ruler of a vast empire in the 4th Century BC which included nearly all of India. He is known today from both archaeological evidence (a series of pillars & rocks inscribed with his edicts) and textual evidence (later Buddhist histories). The three experts who discussed him on In Our Time were Jessica Frazier (University of Kent and the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies), Naomi Appleton (University of Edinburgh) and Richard Gombrich (Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and University of Oxford).

Shortly before Ashoka’s time northern India in the Ganges valley was populated by a set of smallish but relatively sophisticated states. The experts made a comparison with pre-Socratic Greece or with the state of affairs in China at the time. The dynasty of which Ashoka is the third ruler changed this – they started to conquer the other nearby states and Ashoka himself greatly expanded the empire.

Not much is known for sure about Ashoka’s life. Both sorts of available evidence have obvious flaws & biases. The Buddhist histories are written significantly after Ashoka’s death, and follow a clear conversion narrative – so the early years are portrayed as Very Bad so that he can then convert and live the rest of his life as a Very Good Buddhist. Both bits of that narrative are obviously suspect and were likely exaggerated for effect. Gombrich was particularly keen to dismiss any evidence arising from this (he came across as somewhat of an Ashoka fanboy to be honest). Frazier and Appleton were more open to using these texts whilst being aware of their pitfalls as sources. The other evidence is the pillars and rocks with his edicts carved on them, and Gombrich was very keen to hold these up as Ashoka’s own words which were therefore innately trustworthy – I thought it more likely they were also biased as they were intended at the time as a propaganda tool.

His early life was probably quite violent – it seems that although he was of the ruling dynasty he wasn’t the designated heir, and he may have committed murder in order to take the throne. He then embarks on a series of military campaigns to consolidate the empire he has “inherited” and to expand it. By the time this phase of his career finishes he rules from Afghanistan to nearly the southern tip of India, an incredibly vast empire. And then he has some sort of epiphany, a road to Damascus moment. The edicts say that this was a response to the slaughter at one of his last battles at Kalinga where many many civilians were killed. The Buddhist histories say that he met a Buddhist monk and this monk taught him a better way to live. Regardless of what it was (the cynic in me wonders if he’d just run out of expansion room), after this he stopped fighting wars and concentrated on ruling his empire both peacefully and justly.

Having become a Buddhist and renounced violence he ruled for another 40 years. The edicts set out a moral code and say how Ashoka is going to rule. The very fact of their existence is testimony to one of the things that Ashoka did for India – he introduced writing to the region. This means that although these were set up throughout his empire the ordinary people and even the higher status people wouldn’t be able to read them. So there were also literate officials posted to the same place so that they could read them out and explain them to people. They set out the ways that people should behave, based in large part on Buddhist ethics & morality (although he didn’t follow any of the contemporary Buddhist texts exactly). There was an emphasis on the welfare of the people, and they promoted the idea that everyone should do good deeds now in order to benefit themselves in both this world and the next. Interestingly although he preached respect for all religions the edicts were also fairly anti-Brahmin (the forerunners of Hinduism) and against the caste system.

In the wrapping up stage of the programme the three experts discussed whether the edicts were a sincere representation of Ashoka’s plans, beliefs etc or whether they were a cynical piece of propaganda. All three thought it was sincere, but pointed out that this is a very modern Western way of framing the discussion. We tend to set those two things as a pair of opposed opposites, sincere vs. pragmatic, but at the time there would be no paradox in both sincerely believing in Buddhist ethics and also erecting the edicts as a pragmatic political act.

They finished by discussing Ashoka’s legacy. He was instrumental in making Buddhism a worldwide religion, spreading it outside its Indian birthplace throughout his empire and beyond. And in places like Sri Lanka he is remembered for this, and for bringing writing to these areas. However in India his legacy is slight, and is primarily through being rediscovered in the modern era when the edicts were translated. Gombrich discussed how as Hinduism rose to prominence in India Ashoka’s reign and empire were minimised & forgotten in histories of the country – due to his being Buddhist and to his anti-Brahmin, anti-caste stance. His legacy is most clearly seen as being the source of the ideas against which Hindu ideas about kingship and society were reacting.

Swallowed by the Sea: Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Lost City; Lost Kingdoms of Central America;Treasures Decoded

Swallowed by the Sea: Ancient Egypt’s Greatest Lost City was a one-off programme presented by Lucy Blue about the city of Heraclion which existed at one of the mouths of the Nile for around a thousand years. It vanished beneath the waves in the 2nd Century BC, and in modern times it was thought to be purely mythical. However at the beginning of the 21st Century a team of French underwater archaeologists discovered the site off the modern coast of Egypt and have been excavating it ever since. Towards the end of the programme they discussed why it might’ve sunk – the best hypothesis is liquefaction of the islands it was built on, due perhaps to an otherwise minor earthquake. This means that this region – several islands – would’ve suddenly subsided, and ended up under sea level. And this is pretty exciting from an archaeological point of view. The site is a snapshot of what a Ptolemaic era trading port looked like – there’s (obviously) been no rebuilding or demolition and no treasure hunting or retrieval of people’s possessions.

The bulk of the programme focussed on what they’ve learnt about the layout of the city, and the artifacts they’ve been able to bring up to the surface. The whole city covered an area of around 2km2, built across several islands. There were many temples as well as more mundane buildings (including homes, and the apparatus of a port town). The finds range from tiny to enormous (including some huge statues). One of the interesting classes of find are the many boats they’ve found. These include functional boats of course. More interestingly it includes the first example of a ceremonial barque of a type that’s been seen in many inscriptions, but never before discovered. There are also remnants of rituals carried out around this boat – bowls containing burnt offerings that had been carefully slid into the river under the boat. Other interesting finds are coins – particularly interesting as the Egyptians’ didn’t use coins in their own economy. These coins look like Greek coins, but were struck locally (they’ve found the moulds) and used to pay the mercenaries hired to protect the city.

I wasn’t very keen on the way the programme tried to make out that Heraclion was somehow a centrally important Egyptian city. I didn’t really follow the explanation for why Blue believed it to be linked to conferring kingship on the Pharaoh, and I didn’t think the programme needed a “it’s the bestest city ever” hook to make it interesting. Other than that I enjoyed the programme, worth watching.

Lost Kingdoms of Central America was a four part series presented by Jago Cooper about four different pre-Colombus civilisations in Central America. It was a follow up to his series about South American cultures (Lost Kingdoms of South America, post). The cultures presented in this series ranged from the earliest known civilisation in Central America (the Olmec people), through to the culture that Columbus met when he discovered the West Indies (the Taino). The other two were the people who lived in what is now Costa Rica at a time when this was an independent region between the empires of the Aztecs and the Incans. And lastly the people who built Teotihuacan – not the Aztecs, as I first thought it was going to be, but the people who lived there first. In fact when the Aztecs later came to Teotihuacan they thought it was the work of giants or gods.

An interesting and enjoyable series. I didn’t always come away from an episode thinking I’d learnt much about the culture in question – but I think that was because not much is known in many cases.

Treasures Decoded was a six-part Channel 4 series, that we missed the first episode of. The format of each episode was that they looked at a particular ancient object (or building) which has some sort of iconic status, and then discussed what’s known (via several expert talking heads) about it. There was also always some “Controversy?!” angle to the programme – of varying degrees of dubiousness – which I guess was there to provide drama. (Previous sentence needs to be read with an image in mind of me rolling my eyes 😉 )

We’d only originally intended to watch the second episode – about the Great Pyramid at Giza – but then the next one was about the bust of Nefertiti and after that our completist urges kicked in and we finished the series. The Great Pyramid one had quite a lot of info about how and why the Pyramid was built – what sort of stone and how it was worked and so on. The controversy was provided by an engineer who speculates that the Pyramid is in fact a shell filled with rubble – conventional wisdom is that it is fully built out of shaped blocks of stone. His angle was that it would be easier to build that way, but the egyptologists interviewed felt it was important not to impose our own cultural mindset on the Egyptians. I.e. they may well’ve done it the hard way because it mattered that much more to them.

The one about the bust of Nefertiti avoided the obvious controversy (did the archaeologist who found it smuggle it out of Egypt) in favour of a convicted fraudster’s opinion that it was clearly a fake. The conman was convincing enough whilst talking, but my belief in him was undermined somewhat by the fact that as a previously successful conman he was bound to be convincing. If it is a fake, then it was done to such a high standard that it would pass modern forensic tests on the pigments used which any forger of the early 20th Century wouldn’t even know he needed to avoid.

Next episode was Blackbeard’s ship – it has almost certainly been discovered off the coast of America where it is known to have sunk. At the very least there is a ship of the right era and type in the right sort of place which is being excavated. The controversy was a bit weak even by the standards of the series, hinging round disagreements about whether it had sunk accidentally or been deliberately run aground by Blackbeard.

The last couple of episodes were a bit cringemaking, to be honest – I think we rolled our eyes all the way through both to some degree or another. One was about the Ark of the Covenant and suffered from us watching it the same week that we had a talk about it at the EEG (post). The programme focussed heavily on the (controversial) idea that the Ark was nicked from the Temple by Solomon’s son’s priests who brought it to Ethiopia where it has remained every since. I wasn’t convinced. The last episode was Christ’s Holy Spear, which is in a museum case in Vienna. Now, about halfway through the programme they did admit that all the evidence suggests it was made about 8 centuries after Christ, so the real point of the programme was about how the actual object was made and came to gain its reputation. Which was actually interesting, but not only did they take far too long going “oh but could it be Roman and really be the lance that pierced His side on the cross”, but also there were random Nazi and Hitler references the whole way through because apparently Hitler was obsessed with it. And no, Hitler didn’t commit suicide the very same moment the Spear was captured by the Allies.

A bit of a mixed bag, the better episodes were both not religious relic based and were the ones where I knew enough about the subject in hand to navigate my way between solid opinion and flights of fancy. Not recommended.

Other TV watched last week:

Episode 2 of A History of Art in Three Colours – James Fox looking at the history of art through the lens of three different colours, gold, white and blue.

Episode 1 of Oh! You Pretty Things – series about the relationship between pop music and fashion in Britain from the 1960s onwards.

In Our Time: The Talmud

The Talmud is one of the most significant texts in Judaism, second in importance only to the Torah. It is in part a commentary on the Torah, and in part an ongoing discussion (or argument) between various Rabbis & sages about Judaism, the Law and how to interpret the Law. The three experts who discussed the Talmud on In Our Time were Philip Alexander (University of Manchester), Rabbi Norman Solomon (Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies) and Laliv Clenman (Leo Baeck College and King’s College London).

The Talmud began to be written down sometime around the 2nd Century AD, and grew out of an oral tradition which purports to have begun with Moses. There are actually two different Talmuds, one which began to be compiled in or near Jerusalem, and one which was compiled in Babylon. The Jerusalem Talmud is much briefer than the Babylonian one – it might contain a story in a sentence where the Babylonian Talmud takes a page to say the same thing. The Jerusalem Talmud stopped being worked on around the 5th Century AD, whereas the Babylonian Talmud continued to be edited for at least another couple of centuries. Over the time since then the Jerusalem Talmud has decreased in importance, until nowadays if you say “The Talmud” you’re assumed to be referring to the Babylonian one. The experts suggested this was in part historical accident, due possibly to the ease of spread of the text within the Islamic world during the 8th and 9th Centuries – Jews living anywhere from Iraq to Spain were connected, and from Spain it could spread through European Jewish communities too. Whereas the trading and travelling links from Israel were more limited.

The Talmud is composed of two sorts of texts. The first is the Mishnah which is a compilation of the laws, taken both from the Torah and from the oral tradition. This is organised by type into 6 categories, thus making it much easier to refer to than needing to find the right place in the Torah where the subject comes up. These tend to be brief, and require interpretation – which is the purpose of the rest of the Talmud, called the Gemara. The Gemara isn’t just a straightforward linear commentary on the Mishnah, it can go off on tangents and explain contexts around an interpretation. It also contains stories about the Rabbis who taught and argued about the interpretations. These are generally, I think, matchable to historical personages (either living during the centuries the text was being compiled or before when it was an oral tradition) but the historicity of any individual story is a matter of speculation.

Once the Talmud had been compiled and edited it was not frozen in place as a definitive version. Over the subsequent centuries many people have written commentaries, and expanded and re-interpreted what is in the Talmud in the light of their own circumstances and of new technology and so on. The most famous of these, that is printed in many versions of the Talmud was written in the Middle Ages by a French Rabbi known as Rashi. A modern (relatively speaking) version of the Talmud is generally laid out with the Mishnah in the centre of the page, surrounded by the relevant passages from the Gemara. In one of the margins is Rashi’s commentary on this section, and other commentaries or glosses are in other margins.

All three experts were keen to say that the Talmud is not a book, not in the same way that Christian religious texts are. Instead it is an argument or a conversation. You aren’t expected to read the Talmud and take it as the final word, you are expected to read it and engage with it, to argue about the things you disagree with and put forward your own interpretations. This begins even when the Talmud is being taught in Jewish schools – the pupils sit in pairs reading the text and arguing about, even taking positions they don’t agree with to test each others ideas. The Talmud is supposed to evolve with the generations.

However that’s pretty unwieldy if you’re a Jew who wants to know how to follow the law in a particular circumstance – you’d pretty much have to go and consult with a Rabbi for every ruling. So there have also arisen lists of brief statements of what the law is in several common circumstances. These aren’t just distillations of what is said in the Talmud, they also reflect the compiler’s biases and interpretations – so they can be thought of as a part of the Talmud tradition in that sense. However the three experts didn’t seem very keen on them as a concept, even if they are useful – because they freeze the ongoing conversation into a bullet pointed list.

This felt like a programme that barely scratched the surface of what they were talking about. For instance they didn’t have any time to talk about specific examples, which might’ve helped elucidate what sorts of changes had taken place across the centuries since it was originally written down.

Monkey Planet; Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places

Monkey Planet was a three part series presented by George McGavin about primates – monkeys, apes and lemurs. The first episode in was primarily a survey of just how wide-ranging and varied a group the primates are. The other two looked at aspects of primate behaviour that we tend to think of as particularly human, and showed both how it’s actually primate-wide and more varied than our narrow perspective suggests. The second episode concentrated on social interactions – like social hierarchies, family arrangements, maintaining friendships. And the third episode was focussed on intelligence and learning. That had the most startling piece of footage – a chimpanzee who lives in Iowa in a research institute who was shown going on a picnic with one of the scientists and making a campfire and toasting marshmallows on it. It shouldn’t be startling – I know chimpanzees are intelligent and very closely related to humans (we could be considered a third chimpanzee species). But somehow making a fire to toast marshmallows on was more human-ish than I was expecting.

This was a fun series to watch, even if I haven’t written much – its strength was in the footage of all the different primates being primates (which is hard to write about but good to watch).

Another series we finished watching this week was Pagans and Pilgrims: Britain’s Holiest Places. This covered a lot of the same sort of territory as the recent Neil Oliver series, Sacred Wonders of Britain (post) but where the Oliver series organised things chronologically this one organised them thematically. The six half-hour episodes covered things like “Water” or “Caves” and so on. It was based on someone’s book, but not presented by the author. I’m not sure I was all that keen on the actual presenter – Ifor ap Glyn – whose schtick seemed to be that at the start of the episode he tried to come across as completely without knowledge on the subject, then by the end of the half hour he’d “learnt why these places are so important”. And it wasn’t quite believable either at the start or the end. One thing he was very good at, however, was telling the associated stories for places with the right sense of awareness of the ridiculous nature of them!

A bit shallow, but actually did rather well as a contrasting sort of programme to watch after something more weighty (like The First World War).

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 8 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episodes 1 and 2 of Ian Hislop’s Olden Days – a series about the British fascination with an idealised past.

Episode 1 of How to Get Ahead – series about court life during a three different historical periods.

Episode 1 of Precision: The Measure of All Things – series about measurement and the history of measurement.

In Our Time: Hindu Ideas of Creation

In the In Our Time episode that we listened to on Sunday Jessica Frazier (University of Kent and University of Oxford), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Lancaster University) and Gavin Flood (University of Oxford) discussed the ideas about the creation of the universe that are present in the Hindu religion. One thing that they brought up fairly early in the programme is that there isn’t An Answer that everyone must believe. In the earlier texts that survive there’s a pervading sense that this is a mystery and the writers are speculating about the possible answers. Frazier quoted a hymn that asks the question what was before the creation happened, which says that maybe the god in the highest heaven knows, but maybe he does not.

In the Hindu stories about creation the world/universe is not created ex nihilo, nor is it necessarily a one off event. Flood talked about the ideas about recurrence – which include metaphors like the cycle is god breathing out (emanating the universe) and in, or god waking and sleeping. There are two sorts of stories – in one sort the divine emmanates the world from it’s own divine self, and in another sort the world is created from an egg of the stuff that was there previously. These can be quite complex – for instance one has the divine being producing from himself another being with whom he has children. These children then go on to create the world from themselves – this reminded me of Egyptian cosmology, and they also talked in the programme about similarities with the Gnostic tradition of the demiurge who is created by the divine being then creates the material world. The other sort of story with the creation from pre-existing material gives rise an idea of the divine as craftsman or architect.

These early texts are generally not much concerned with how the world is made or created – there are these stories but much more space is devoted to how society is and should be organised, and rituals and so on. As I said in the first paragraph they told us that the mystery of it was part of the point for the early thinkers. But one thing these stories were useful for in the context of the rest of the texts was setting out that the nature and hierarchies of society were divinely ordained in the original creation. For instance one of the stories has the different castes being made from different parts of the divine being’s body – like the warriors from his strong arms, and so on. So the castes of society are all the necessary parts of the body of society.

I think they said these early texts were from around 3000 years ago, and obviously over time the Hindu thinking about creation has changed. Around 2000 years ago they said that Hindu scholars began to approach the idea from a more philosophical direction. Rather than being happy with a central mystery and speculation they began to think about how it might’ve worked and why the divine would create the world anyway. I think this is where one of the experts told us that one of the ideas for why the divine created the world is that it was to incarnate in the world and enjoy all the pleasures it had to offer. Which is an interesting counterpoint to Christianity where the incarnation of God as Jesus is fundamentally about the suffering of the world.

Later yet, around 1000 years ago, the stories about creation began to take on a more theological cast – the stories began to be about named gods, and more specific in detail. This is where Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva come in as the actors in the creation stories. However there is still (and still remains) no sense that there is One True Answer to how the world was created. Ram-Prasad told us that different families have different traditions for which gods and stories they give prominence to. There is also no sense that the stories are literal truth, so there’s not any conflict between Hindu religious belief and modern physics – the creation stories were always metaphors and speculation.

One other thing Bragg brought up (but Flood shot down quite quickly) was that some of these metaphorical stories can be perceived as matching up quite well with modern scientific ideas about the beginning of the universe. But as Flood said, it’s important not to get carried away with oneself about a coincidence.

(I found this rather hard to write up for some reason, hopefully I haven’t mangled it too much in trying to make it coherent!)

The Stuarts; Bible Hunters

For some odd reason the BBC had a new documentary series about The Stuarts and then only aired it in Scotland. I can see that it was intended to tie in with the upcoming vote on independence but it was straightforwardly a documentary rather than a piece of propaganda. So I’m not really sure why it was kept north of the border. We only spotted it because I’d recorded something else off BBC2 Scotland to avoid a clash, and there was a trailer for The Stuarts.

The presenter was Clare Jackson, who I don’t think I’ve seen anything by before, and her thesis was that the Stuarts were the defining royal dynasty of Great Britain – despite the actual creation of the United Kingdom only happening almost by accident at the end of the Stuart era. She took us through the whole 17th Century (and a smidge beyond) in chronological order. The first episode covered James VI & I, and the early years of Charles I. The accession of James to the English throne in 1603 after Elizabeth I’s death had been a time of optimism – for James and for his new country. James’s dream was to unite the two countries in the same way that the crowns were now united, however he wasn’t able (even with his high degree of political skill) to persuade the English in particular to do this. Jackson also covered the seeds of Charles I’s autocratic leanings – in particular she pointed at his visit to Spain, whilst he was trying (and failing) to negotiate a Spanish marriage for himself. At the court of the Hapsburgs he got a taste of how royalty “should” be treated.

The second episode covered the civil wars and the Restoration. In this episode Jackson was keen to stress how the way we’re taught British history today (particularly in England) simplifies and prettifies this collection of conflicts. We’re often presented with it as “democracy vs. autocracy”, and the parts of the war outside England are often ignored. She said it is better compared to modern conflicts like the violence & genocide in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And she emphasised the Irish parts of the Civil Wars, which were not pretty in the slightest and still have repercussions today. Cromwell is a divisive figure – either a hero (from a Protestant point of view) or a villain (from the Catholic point of view). She also pointed out how Cromwell was by the end King in all but name (hardly the champion of democracy that English school history would like to portray him as) and after he died his power and title passed on to his son. Who was sufficiently bad at the job that Charles II was invited back to England.

The last episode could be thought of as the long decline of the Stuarts … we started with the disaster that was about to be James VII & II. Charles II had been fairly astutely focused on remaining King – he might’ve had Catholic leanings and a Catholic wife but he’d stayed a Protestant (until his deathbed, perhaps). His brother James, however, did convert to Catholicism and was fervent about it – he resigned public office rather than give up his Catholicism. Charles never managed to sire a legitimate heir, so James was next in line to the throne. Charles did his best to mitigate the problems with his having a Catholic heir – he had James’s daughters brought up Protestant and married them to good Protestants (like William of Orange, a diplomatic necessity as well as an internal political one). So when James did come to the throne it was seen as a brief blip before Mary & William took over – dealable with. When James’s new wife had a son this changed and it was time for more direct action, William was invited to invade (this is the Glorious Revolution) which he did and by chance he won bloodlessly. William and Mary, and then Mary’s sister Anne after them were childless so after Anne the next possible Stuart heirs were the Catholic descendants of James. And this is what finally brought about the creation of the United Kingdom that had been James VI & I’s dream. England wanted the Protestant Hanoverans to inherit after Anne died, Scotland would’ve preferred the Stuart heir – and so the crowns and thus the countries would part unless Parliament succeeded in passing the Act of Union.

A good series, I really don’t know why it was confined to the Scottish bit of BBC2.

Bible Hunters wasn’t a promising name for a series, but actually it turned out to be pretty good (with some flaws). Jeff Rose took us through the 19th and early 20th Century attempts to find or confirm the truth of the Bible. The first episode focussed on the New Testament, and the efforts of 19th Century scholars and explorers to find early copies of the Gospels. The idea was to show that the Gospels were indeed the inerrant word of God, and that the narrative of Jesus life and ministry was correct. Egypt was the target of these expeditions because of the early monastic tradition in the country dating back to much nearer the time of Jesus life than anything in Europe could do. Some monasteries (like that at Sinai) have been inhabited continuously since at least the 3rd Century AD. What was found shook the certainty that nothing had changed as the Bible was copied and translated over the centuries. In particular the ending of the Gospel of Mark (the oldest of the four Gospels, thought to’ve been written first) was different, and different in an important fashion. The modern end of that Gospel has Jesus seen after his resurrection, and the women who went to his tomb are instructed to go forth and tell people the good news. The 2nd Century version of the text ends with the women finding the empty tomb, being told by an angel that Jesus has risen, and being afraid and telling no-one. The programme built this up as being a cataclysmic blow to the faithful, and certainly it causes a lot of problems if your faith requires the words in the Bible to be literally the whole truth and literally unchanging.

The second episode looked more generally at what expeditions to Egypt showed about both the general truth of the biblical world view and the construction of the canonical texts of the Bible. As the history of Pharaonic Egypt began to be examined it cast doubt on the accuracy of the Biblical stories about the history & age of the Earth. For instance when the Dendera zodiac was found it was thought to be 12,000 years old (now known to be false, it’s Ptolemaic) and how did that square with Usher’s careful calculations about the Earth having been created in 4,004 BC? And other Gospels were found buried near old monasteries – which had been hidden after the official choice of the four we now know as being the canonical books. These included a Gospel according to Mary Magdalene, which gave a bigger role for women in the early church than in later times. And also Gnostic Gospels.

The format of the programme was Rose going to various places in Egypt, and also talking to various academics from a variety of institutions about the history of the people who found these things and the history of the ideas. And it was interesting to watch, but I kept running into things that made me stop and think “wait, is that really true?”. Which then casts doubt on the accuracy of other things that I didn’t already know something about. For example Bishop Usher’s calculation of the age of the Earth was mentioned, and Rose told us that “everyone believed that the Earth was only 6,000 years old” at that time. But as far as I was aware by the time Usher was doing his calculations there were a lot of people (if not most people) who thought the Earth was much older than that – Usher was more of a last-gasp of outdated thought rather than mainstream. I could be wrong, it’s not an area I know much about but things like that let the doubt in. Another example was that the EEF (forerunner of the modern EES) was presented as being solely about proving the truth of the Bible when it started – but when we visited the EES last September (post) we were told that although the biblical links were used to get more funding preservation of the ancient monuments as things in themselves not as “it’s in the bible” was also an important goal. The discrepancy could well be down to spin, but again this lets doubts creep in about the accuracy or spin on the rest of the programme.

I am glad I watched it, but I don’t know if I’d trust it on the details without cross-checking the facts.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History – two part series about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, part dramatised documentary presented by Suzanne Lipscomb.

Episode 2 of Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England – this was part of the BBC’s Tudor Season in 2013. It’s a series about life in Elizabethan times from the perspective of the differences between now and then, what you’d need to know if you could travel back there.

Robins of Eden and The Rabbits of Skomer – two rather retro-feeling mini nature documentaries, lasting just 10 minutes each.

The Joy of the Single – programme about singles, talking to various music industry people. Covered things like the history of the single as a phenomenon, the physical object of a 7″ vinyl single and the sort of emotional impact that various singles had on these people.

Episode 2 of The Great British Year – series about British wildlife and countryside over the whole year. Lots of gorgeous shots of animals, and timelapse sequences of landscapes.

Blink: A Horizon Guide to the Senses – programme presented by Kevin Fong about the senses. Not much new footage, instead it made use of the last 40 years of Horizon to pull out illustrative bits and pieces from the archives. Some neat things to see, but in other ways it felt a bit shallow.

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve; Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve was a three part series that was partly a travelogue and partly about the history of Christian pilgrimage across Europe and the Holy Land from medieval times through to the modern day. Reeve made it pretty clear several times that he’s not a Christian himself, so this was an outsider’s view on the subject. He did, however, talk to several people who do pilgrimages for religious purposes today, so we got both sides of the subject represented. The first episode started in Lindisfarne and made its way down to Canterbury and mostly talked about medieval experience of pilgrimage. Then the second episode went through France and Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, and then across the alps to Rome. The third episode went from Istanbul to Jerusalem (via Bethlehem).

Reeve seemed focussed primarily on the question of what people get out of pilgrimage. His conclusions were that as well as the visiting of spiritually significant sites the journey itself has spiritual benefits for the people who do pilgrimages. They have a time to step outside of their daily lives and reflect on how they’re living and what they’re doing with their lives. Be that in a religious sense or a purely spiritual sense, various of the modern pilgrims he talked to weren’t people who called themselves Christian.

It wouldn’t be a Simon Reeve programme if it didn’t also look at the less uplifting parts of the subject! In the last episode there he was travelling through the West Bank (as one has to, if one’s visiting Bethlehem), and took the opportunity to contrast the modern political situation with the spiritual significance of the region to so many people. Another example was his visit to a very modern cult centre – the town where Padre Pio lived, who died in 1968. This has a massive new cathedral, a TV station of it’s own (run by monks), lots of fancy hotels in the town for all the touristspilgrims. And various rumours of how he kept his stigmata open during life by the judicious application of carbolic acid … He was canonised, but Reeve implied that was more an attempt by the Vatican to keep it in house so’s to speak. The cult was growing up anyway, so he was officially made a saint.

An interesting series 🙂 And in a piece of serendipity the first episode overlapped in subject matter with the end of Neil Oliver’s recent series about Sacred Wonders of Britain that we’d just finished watching (post). The second episode had some overlap with the second episode of Waldemar Januszczak’s series about Baroque art which we’re also watching at the moment. The three presenters have very different styles so it was interesting to get the various perspectives all so quickly together!

The other series we finished watching this week was Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – a three part series about species that didn’t die out in mass extinction events presented by Richard Fortey. Each episode covered a different extinction event, and Fortey tracked down 10 species that survived it through to modern times. The first one was about the Great Dying (which occurred 252 million years ago) which is the most significant extinction even with the greatest die-off of species. For this one he looked at things like horseshoe crabs, sea cucumbers and lampreys. The second covered the KT boundary – i.e. death of the dinosaurs, so had an emphasis on birds, mammals and crocodiles. And the third one looked at the Ice Age and at the cold adapted species that made it through to our own times.

This was definitely more my sort of thing than J’s. I thought it managed to combine a bit of geology, a bit of evolutionary biology and a bit of modern day travelogue into an interesting whole (even tho I think I knew of most of it before, it’s nice to actually see things sometimes). Fortey was an engaging presenter, who was also pretty entertaining as he tried to handle live specimens with varying degrees of success and comfort. I had a great deal of sympathy with that as someone who’s significantly worse at handling live animals than he was yet is still a biologist 🙂 Oh, and it also had a running theme of Fortey eating some of these survivors & telling us how they taste, which was a slightly odd (but fun) addition.

Other TV watched this week:

The Coffee Trail with Simon Reeve – one-off programme about coffee growing in Vietnam. Vietnam is the main supplier of coffee for the instant coffee trade, and it’s as exploitative a trade as you’d expect. The regime in Vietnam isn’t particularly nice either.

Episode 2 of Baroque! From St Peter’s to St Paul’s – gloriously over the top series about Baroque art and architecture, presented by Waldemar Januszczak.

Episode 1 of The Stuarts – a series about the Stuart Kings of England & Scotland, presented by Clare Jackson, and about how they shaped the United Kingdom and how they were shaped by it. Broadcast on the Scottish version of BBC2 only.

Nigel Slater’s Great British Biscuit – a similar programme to Slater’s previous one on sweets (post), part nostalgia, part history of biscuits. Lots of “oh I remember those” moments 🙂

Greek Myths: Tales of Travelling Heroes – programme presented by Robin Lane Fox about the early Greek myths about the origins of their gods. Also looking at the links between the mythological stories and the landscape the Greeks knew, and also the links to Hittite mythology. We both had quite a lot of deja vu watching it, and figured out eventually that we’d watched it before about 3 years ago and had just forgotten (brief post on my livejournal). Interesting & worth watching, even for a second time 🙂