A Criminal History of Mankind (34 page)

On 8 June a report arrived stating that an army in northern Italy had decided to join the rebels. For Nero, this was the last straw; he decided to flee to Egypt. It was a scheme he had been considering for some time - he had remarked that, if he lost the throne, he could always live by his art. He left the Golden House and moved to his mansion in the Servilian gardens, en route for the port of Ostia, where ships had been ordered to get ready. When he woke from a short sleep to find that the Praetorian Guard was no longer on duty, he seems to have realised that this was the end. In fact, the commander of the Praetorian Guard had decided to go over to Galba and had bribed the men with an offer of 30,000 sesterces each (about £750) to proclaim Galba emperor. Nero hurried to the houses of various friends but could get no reply. Returning to his house, he found that his bodyguard had fled and had taken his bedclothes and his box of poison. Sounds of shouting and cheering from a nearby army camp convinced him that the revolt was spreading. With only four companions - including his ‘wife’ Sporus - he set out for the house of his freedman Phaon nearby. There he crawled into a cellar, ordered his grave to be dug, and had hysterics, repeating over and over again: ‘What a loss I shall be to the arts.’ A runner arrived with a message; it declared that the senate had branded him a public enemy and decreed that he should be executed in the ‘ancient style’ - which meant being flogged to death. He asked one of his companions to commit suicide first, and then, when he showed reluctance, muttered: ‘How ugly and vulgar my life has become.’ When he heard the sound of approaching hooves, he placed the sword point to his throat; one of the others also placed his hand on it, and pushed it in. He was already dying when a centurion entered to arrest him; as the man tried to stanch the blood with his cloak, he murmured ‘How loyal you are,’ and expired.

The lesson of Nero is very simple. He makes it possible to see that criminality is basically childishness. He was not a particularly ‘evil’ man - he completely lacked the kind of misdirected resentment that characterises most real criminals, from Alexander of Pherae to Carl Panzram. But because he became Caesar before he had time to grow up, he was totally subjective, completely self-absorbed. He saw other people as slightly unreal; to him, in fact, the whole world was slightly unreal. So when he wanted something, he simply grabbed it. When someone stood in his way, he ‘removed’ him. Because of his childishness, this came as naturally to him as killing mice to a cat.

In Nero, we can see the basic problem of human development: the moment human beings are released from the pressure of necessity they seem to go rotten. And if that is so, then there is something self-defeating about the very idea of civilisation, since its aim is to release us from necessity. It seems to be a vicious circle. Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.

Yet although this is the truth, it is not the whole truth. As we examine human history, we realise that man also seems to possess an instinctive counterbalance to this natural drift towards criminality. In its most basic form, this seems to consist of an intuitive certainty that this narrow world of the personal ego is not the whole world - that something far greater and more interesting lies beyond it. This excited feeling of the sheer interestingness of the universe is inherent in all poetry, music, science, philosophy and religion. When we read of great men - an Alexander or a Frederick II - dying in a state of world-weary pessimism, we feel that they have somehow allowed themselves to become blinded by fatigue and allowed their senses to close. Somewhere along the way, they have missed the point. And when the conquerors and criminals have wreaked their havoc and left the scene, the sense of magic and mystery flows back like a tide and sweeps away the wreckage, leaving the beach smooth and clean again.

It is necessary to grasp this if we are to understand the remarkable spread of Christianity across the civilised world. There had been dozens - probably hundreds - of religions before Christianity; we have seen that there was a kind of worldwide religious explosion in the fifth century B.C. None had achieved the same impact or spread with the same speed as Christianity. And this is basically because Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism. Just as a pessimist is a man who has to live with an optimist, so an idealist is a man who has to live with a materialist. Roman religion was almost comically literal-minded; they believed, for example, that a vote in the senate could send their late emperor to the abode of the gods. (It is true that this is not so different from the Catholic Church’s procedure for canonisation.) Roman religion was not even original; it was simply taken over wholesale from ancient Greece. Roman literature, Roman art, Roman philosophy, were all superficial. There was nothing in Roman culture that could appeal to a man of imagination. Christianity was an expression of a craving for a deeper meaning in human existence.

The agitator known as Jeshua - or Jesus - of Nazareth was born in about the twentieth year of the reign of Augustus - around 10 B.C. Pompey the Great had placed the Jews under Roman rule in 63 B.C., and the Jews loathed it. Crassus had plundered the temple. Herod the Great, appointed by the Romans to rule Judea, was as violent and murderous as any of the later Roman emperors, and was hated by all the religion factions with the exception of the Hellenised Sadducees. So the expectation of the long-awaited Messiah, a warrior-king who would free the Jews from foreign rule, increased year by year.

The early records of Jesus of Nazareth were so tampered with by later Christians that it is difficult to form a clear picture of his few brief years as a teacher and prophet. Even his physical description was altered; it was reconstructed in the 1920s by the historian Robert Eisler in
The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist
. Among the documents Eisler used was a ‘wanted notice’ probably signed by Pontius Pilate, and later quoted by the Jewish historian Josephus, whose reconstructed text runs as follows:

At this time, too, there appeared a certain man of magical power, if it is permissible to call him man, whom certain Greeks call a son of God, but his disciples the true prophet, said to raise the dead and heal all diseases.

His nature and form were human; a man of simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, small stature, three cubits high (about five feet), hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose and meeting eyebrows, so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair with a parting in the middle of the head, after the manner of the Nairites, and an undeveloped beard.

This original portrait of Jesus - with a humped back, long nose, half-bald head and scanty beard - was altered by later Christians to read:

ruddy skin, medium stature, six feet high, well grown, with a venerable face, handsome nose, goodly black eyebrows with good eyes so that spectators could love him, with curly hair the colour of unripe hazel nuts, with a smooth and unruffled, unmarked and unwrinkled forehead, a lovely red, blue eyes, beautiful mouth, with a copious beard the same colour as the hair, not long, parted in the middle, arms and hands full of grace...

And so it went on, turning the unprepossessing little man into an early Christian equivalent of a film star. It is easy to see why it is difficult to take most of the Christian texts about Jesus at their face value.

If the Romans had been coarsened by success and victory, it could be said that the Jews had been refined by failure and defeat. At about the time the Mediterranean was undergoing its ordeal by fire at the hands of the ‘sea peoples’, the Hebrews, who lived in the land of Goshen near the Nile delta, had been enslaved by the Egyptians. At about the time of the Trojan War, they were led out of Egypt by Moses and spent hard years wandering in the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula. Hardship deepened their religious sense; they became a people of one God, whose laws were based on religious ideals. (The story of the dance around the golden calf suggests that at an earlier period they were polytheistic, like most Semitic peoples.) Under Joshua, they achieved victories in the land of Canaan and adopted many of the ways of the Canaanites. Then there was a long and desperate struggle against the Philistines, who were finally conquered by King David around 1000 B.C. But after the death of Solomon (about 930 B.C.) there were unsettled times, and two centuries of strife and civil war. In the eighth century B.C., the Israelites came under the brutal Assyrian yoke, and in 705 B.C. the kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. After the destruction of Nineveh (612 B.C.), the Babylonians became the dominant power in the Middle East, and the Jews were again dragged into captivity. They were allowed to return to the ruined city of Jerusalem when Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians (538 B.C.), but remained under Persian rule for two centuries. Under the leadership of the Persian Jew Nehemiah they rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and returned to the old religious ways taught by Moses. In 332 B.C. Persian rule was overthrown by Alexander the Great, and for nine years the Jews were his subjects. After his death, they again fell under the rule of Egypt. One of Alexander’s generals, Seleucas, had conquered an empire and founded a dynasty, so from 198 to 168 B.C. the Jews were ruled by the Seleucids. It was the attempt of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV to Hellenise Judea and ban the Jewish religion that led to the revolt of Judas Maccabeus and a brief period of political freedom. But less than a century later, Pompey conquered Jerusalem, and the Jews become Roman vassals.

So, over the course of many centuries, the Jews had become accustomed to war, persecution and a foreign yoke. The Jewish religious impulse was deepened by adversity. Understandably, it laid emphasis on pacifism, on gentleness and mercy, on the blessedness of the meek and humble and the rewards of the next world. Rabbi Akiba said that the essence of the Mosaic message is to love one’s neighbour, while Rabbi Hillel stated that the central message of Judaism is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In the time of Jesus, there were three main religious sects in Judea: the Sadducees, who were conservatives, the Zealots, who were revolutionaries, and the Pharisees, who occupied the middle ground. There was also a powerful group known as the Essenes, who might be called ‘withdrawalists’. Like modern Quakers, they founded their own communities, where they lived pious and abstemious lives. Their teachings had come down to them, they asserted, from a certain Teacher of Righteousness who had been killed by the forces of darkness. In 1947, some of the scriptures of the Essenes came to light in caves on the shores of the Dead Sea - where the Essenes had once lived. These Dead Sea scrolls revealed that the Essenes called themselves the Elect of God, that they initiated new members through baptism, and that they had a protocol for seating that resembles that of the Last Supper described in the New Testament. John the Baptist was almost certainly an Essene. And the Dead Sea scrolls make it clear that Jesus was heavily influenced by them.

So the doctrines we now associate with Jesus were familiar in the Jewish world for centuries before his arrival. Judaism already forbade men to hate their enemies. This carpenter’s son from Nazareth, who began to preach in the twenty-eighth year of his life, went a step further and declared that we should also love our enemies, and that if someone strikes us on one cheek, we should turn the other. In the time of Roman occupation, this must have seemed to most people sheer stupidity - rather as if some English religious teacher had declared in 1939 that there should be no resistance to Hitler. Clearly, this pacifistic doctrine can have had no wide appeal in 20 A.D., the sixth year of the reign of Tiberius, even though Jesus’s personal magnetism seems to have been remarkable. How, then, did he make an appeal to the intensely patriotic Jews of his time? The answer which emerges from contemporary documents is that Jesus taught that some immense, catastrophic change was about to take place: in fact, the end of the world. The kingdom of God was at hand. There would be wars and rumours of wars, famine and earthquakes. The dead would be brought back to life. The sun would be turned into darkness and the moon to blood, and stars would fall from heaven. All this would not be at some vague date in future centuries, but within the lifetime of people then alive. Accordingly, it would be better for the faithful to take no thought for the morrow - God would provide.

The teachings of this apocalyptic preacher offended Pharisees, Sadducees and Zealots alike. The Zealots - who wanted to see Rome destroyed - had no patience with this preaching about ‘kingdom come’. It could only distract attention from the real struggle. The Sadducees were inclined to Hellenism and disbelieved in life after death; for them Jesus was an uncultivated fanatic. The Pharisees were the Temple party and stood for strict observance of every minor religious ritual. Jesus felt about them as Martin Luther was later to feel about the Catholic Church, and he went out of his way to attack them. The result is that Jesus had few real supporters during his lifetime. He was a minor and rather unpopular prophet; if he had lived to be seventy and died in his bed, he would probably now be totally forgotten.

But after four years of preaching, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and proclaimed himself the Messiah, the saviour who had been awaited for centuries. This made him suddenly dangerous to the Jewish establishment. Accordingly, he was arrested and taken before the high priest. Caiaphas has come off rather badly in the history books, but he cannot really be blamed for what followed. When asked if he was the Messiah, Jesus replied in the affirmative. Caiaphas was understandably outraged, for it must have seemed obvious to him that nothing was less likely than that this unprepossessing little man with his hump-back and straggly beard could be the man destined to lead the Jews to freedom. He called Jesus a blasphemer - which, technically speaking, he was - and sent him off to Pilate to be judged, confident that the Roman would recognise the danger. But Pilate was a cultured Roman, and when he asked Jesus the same question, Jesus was cautious enough to reply only ‘You have said so.’ Pilate had been a weary spectator of the endless religious squabbles of the Jews for years - he probably thought they were all mad, or at least deluded - and he no doubt resented the attempt of Caiaphas to make him the executioner of this gentle-looking little man. He tried to get Jesus released - mercy was shown to a condemned man every Passover - but the people, who were as clamorous as a Roman mob, said they would prefer another rebel called Barabbas, who at least had tried to kill a Roman guard. Pilate gave way - he had sentenced so many rebels to death that it made little difference; in fact, this Jesus was to be crucified between two of them. And so, like thousands of other victims of Rome, Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross.