A Criminal History of Mankind (35 page)

And how did he go on to conquer the world? Again, the reasons are complex. The most important is undoubtedly that soon after his death his disciples claimed to have seen him again, and actually touched him. One historian, Hugh Schonfield, argued in
The Passover Plot
(1966) that Jesus was probably given a drug that made him appear to be dead and that he revived in a perfectly normal way. It is just conceivable. It is just as conceivable that Jesus was not completely dead when taken from the cross - a good bribe to a Roman centurion could work wonders. In another controversial book, published in 1982 (
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh), Henry Lincoln also suggested the drug hypothesis; and he went further to cite a secret Rosicrucian tradition that Jesus was married, and left Judea with Mary Magdalene to live out the remainder of his life in Gaul, where his descendants became the Merovingian kings. (He argues that the discovery of this secret explains the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau and how a poor Catholic priest became rich overnight.) Sceptics may feel that the explanation could be altogether simpler, and that the whole story of the Resurrection was invented by the followers of Jesus. Whatever the explanation, it is certain that stories of Jesus’s miraculous revival after death were circulating soon after the crucifixion.

One thing about Jesus that seems very clear is that he possessed remarkable healing powers. Josephus, as we have seen, describes him as a magician. It makes no difference whether we attribute such powers to suggestion or to some genuine ability to release a healing force; what seems quite clear is that they work, and can be developed. Jesus had developed them to a high degree, and this seems to explain why he was regarded as a magician.

Nothing spreads faster than tales of the marvellous; and this undoubtedly explains why Jesus’s death on the cross only made his name more potent than ever. At this early stage there were two distinct groups of disciples. The Nasoraeans, or Messianists, were the original followers, who believed that Jesus was a political Messiah who would lead the Jews to freedom. He was still alive, and would in due course reappear to fulfil his promises. (King Arthur later inspired identical beliefs in Britain, and many people were still expecting him six centuries after his death.) They most emphatically did not believe that Jesus was a god in any sense of the word - this would have been contrary to all Jewish religious teaching. The other group, who came to be called Christians, were followers of Paul as much as of Jesus. Within a few years of the crucifixion, this Paul, who loathed the Messianists, had undergone a sudden conversion, which suggests that his original hatred of Jesus was based upon some deep fascination that he found unacceptable. Paul created a new version of Messianism that was far more strange and mystical than that of the Nasoraeans. Paul’s Jesus was the son of God, who had been sent to earth to save men from the consequences of Adam’s sin. All men had to do was to believe in Jesus and they were ‘saved’. And when the end of the world occurred - as it was bound to do within the next few years, according to Jesus - these ‘Christians’ would live on an earth transformed into paradise.

The Messianists and the Christians detested one another with the peculiarly virulent loathing that seemed to characterise Jewish religious controversies. Paul’s version won through a historical accident. As we have seen, the Jews broke into open rebellion just before the end of the reign of Nero, and he was forced to send his general Vespasian to try and subdue them. But in the year after Nero’s suicide, Rome had four emperors. The first was Galba, the Spanish governor who had joined Vindex in the rebellion. Within a short time the Praetorian Guard found him too strict and closefisted, and murdered him. They appointed Nero’s friend Otho, from Portugal. Meanwhile, the German troops had proclaimed their general Vitellius emperor, and he marched on Rome and defeated Otho. Otho committed suicide. Then Vespasian, still on the other side of the Mediterranean, was proclaimed emperor by his troops. He seized Egypt and cut off Rome’s grain. When legions from the Danube marched on Rome and killed Vitellius, Vespasian was next in line for the post of emperor, and was appointed by the senate in 70 A.D. He sent his son Titus to subdue the Jewish rebels, and Titus did it with Roman brutality and ruthlessness. After a six-month siege, the temple was burned, the Zealots massacred (more than a million of them), and the treasures of the Temple were carried back to Rome. The Messianists were among those who were slaughtered. So Paul’s Christians (who were scattered all over the place) were the only followers of Jesus left.

Any Messianists who remained must certainly have felt that this Christianity of Paul was a blasphemous travesty of the teachings of their Messiah; and, in a literal sense, they were correct. Whether Jesus was Jewish by nationality or not (and Galilee contained more Arabs than Jews), he was undoubtedly a Jew by religion, and as such would have been horrified at the notion that he was a god. That was the kind of blasphemy that was typical of the Romans - Pontius Pilate had mortally offended the Jews by allowing his legionnaires to march through Jerusalem with a picture of the deified Augustus on their standards. Yet in another sense, Paul’s Christianity was an accurate reflection of the basic spirit of the ideas of Jesus. Bernard Shaw once suggested that Jesus went insane at some later point in his career - when he became convinced he was the Messiah - for Shaw felt that the earlier Jesus regarded himself as an ethical teacher and no more. But there is no evidence that Jesus ever took such a rationalistic view of his mission. His statement that he could forgive sins suggests that he believed he was in some kind of direct communication with God. Christians believe, of course, that this was true; but it seems clear that Jesus also believed that the end of the world was about to occur, and if he believed that this was also a message from God, he was mistaken. By modern standards, Jesus was suffering from delusions.

Paul seems to have been fascinated by the parallel between Jesus and various other Middle Eastern gods who died and were resurrected - Attis and Adonis, the Egyptian Osiris, the Babylonian Tammuz - such stories were common at the time. Paul was also a Jew, and the Jews in the time of Jesus were much preoccupied with the question of how, if God is good, He could have made so much misery and suffering. The answer of the rabbis, of course, was that Adam had sinned, and so been expelled from Eden. Now, in one stroke, Paul had added an amazing new dimension to Judaism: not only a traditional saviour-god, but one who had come to solve that ancient problem of misery and sin. Jesus had vicariously atoned for the sins of mankind; after Armageddon, his followers would live for ever.

This new version of Christianity appealed to gentiles as much as Jews. Anyone of any sensitivity only had to look at the Rome of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero to understand just what Paul meant about the fall of man. These sex-mad drunkards were a living proof that something had gone wrong. And the Roman matrons who took up prostitution for pleasure revealed that Eve had fallen just as far as Adam. The world was nauseated by Roman brutality, Roman materialism and Roman licentiousness. Christianity sounded a deeper note; it offered a vision of meaning and purpose, a vision of seriousness. For the strong, it was a promise of new heights of awareness. For the weak, it was a message of peace and reconciliation, of rest for the weary, of reward for the humble. And for everyone, it promised an end to the kingdom of Caesar, with its crucifixions, floggings and arbitrary executions. The Christians hoped it was a promise of the end of the world.

For a while, it looked as if that promise was about to be fulfilled, just as the god-man had foretold. Nero was indeed the last of the hereditary Caesars. And in the reign of his successor Titus - the man who besieged Jerusalem - there was a plague in Rome, followed by another great fire. In 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius erupted, causing a darkness that lasted for days, and burying Pompeii and its sister town Herculaneum under many feet of muddy ash. Fortunately, most of the inhabitants escaped; but the curiosity of the naturalist Pliny cost him his life - he sailed across the bay to see what was happening and was asphyxiated.

Incredibly, Rome had still not learnt its lesson: that allowing a man to become Caesar merely because he is the ‘next in line’ is a sure formula for creating mad dictators. It happened again when the good-natured Titus died (after only two years in power). He was succeeded by his surly brother Domitian - who had been jealous of Titus - a man whose temperament resembled that of Tiberius. But he was soon behaving rather worse. After an attempted rebellion of the Rhine troops, he extracted confessions by a new form of torture -holding a blazing torch under the prisoners’ genitals (he seems to have been a homosexual sadist); after which he held mass executions. There followed the usual vicious circle of tyranny; as he became more suspicious of plots, he became a madman, having senators executed on trivial charges and courtiers crucified upside down for chance remarks. (One member of the audience in the newly-built Colosseum was dragged into the arena, tied up and torn to pieces by wild dogs for a mildly offensive joke.) The more violent he became, the more his subjects plotted against him. We know rather less about his crimes than about those of earlier Caesars, for by the time Suetonius reached Domitian (the last of his
Twelve Caesars
) he had grown tired of cataloguing horrors; but it seems clear that Domitian was as bad as the worst of the emperors. As with Caligula, his madness took the form of self-aggrandisement; he insisted on being addressed as ‘Lord God’ and had endless gold statues and triumphal arches erected to himself all over the empire. (To do him justice, he
had
remarkable successes as a general against Germans and Dacians.) And because he regarded himself as a god, he ordered violent persecution of the Christians, who had the temerity to refuse to pay homage to his divinity. (The followers of the religion of Mithras, which came from Persia and was equally popular at the time, had no such problem and so escaped persecution.)

The non-stop slaughter made Domitian’s assassination inevitable, and it finally happened in 96 A.D., the fifteenth year of his reign. Suetonius, who lived through Domitian’s reign, was able to procure a remarkable first-hand account of the killing. Soothsayers had prophesied the death, and Domitian was even told when to expect it - in the fifth hour of the day. At dawn, he condemned to death a German soothsayer who had prophesied bloodshed. Domitian scratched a pimple on his forehead and made it bleed, commenting: ‘I hope this is all the blood that needs to be shed.’ He asked his servant the time, and the man - who was in the plot - answered ‘Six o’clock.’ Domitian heaved a sigh of relief and went off to his bath. On the way there, he was told that a man had arrived with news of another plot and was now waiting in his bedroom; so Domitian hurried back. The assassin was waiting for him, holding a list of names of people supposed to be in the plot; as Domitian read it, the man stabbed him in the groin. Domitian grappled with him and fought like an animal. He shouted to his boy to hand him the dagger from under his pillow, then run for help. But the conspirators had removed the blade of the dagger and locked the door. Domitian tried lo wrestthe knife away from the assassin, and cut his fingers to the bone; then he tried to claw out the man’s eyes. The assassin managed to go on stabbing until Domitian collapsed and died. The news of his death brought universal rejoicing. His name was removed from all public monuments.

And at last, even Rome had learnt the lesson: that power can turn a despot into a homicidal maniac, and that the solution was not to leave the choice of emperor to chance or heredity but to select him with some care. The result was five excellent rulers - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius - and almost a century of peace and prosperity. Nerva, selected by the senate, was seventy at the time and died two years later. But he had chosen as his successor a brilliant general, Trajan, who proved to be a second Julius Caesar. In his nineteen-year reign he conquered the Dacians to the north of the Danube and the Parthians to the east of the Euphrates, and pushed the bounds of the Roman Empire to its farthest limits. What he failed to see was that, in over-extending Rome’s manpower, he was leaving a considerable problem to most of his successors - a problem that would be solved only with the final collapse of the empire nearly four centuries later.

However, his successor - his cousin Hadrian - recognised the problem, and began his reign by contracting his eastern boundaries. This had the desired effect, and enabled Hadrian to spend most of his long reign making a leisurely tour of his empire. The roads were now safe, the seas free from pirates. As he wandered at large from Egypt to Scotland, Hadrian built roads, aqueducts, theatres, bridges, temples, even cities - the discovery of concrete enabled his engineers to build faster and more magnificently than ever before.

Hadrian had the interesting idea of choosing two emperors to reign jointly, like the consuls of old; they were called Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus; and since both were little more than children when Hadrian’s health began to fail, he appointed a caretaker emperor, Antoninus Pius. In the old days this would have been a certain formula for murder and despotism; but Hadrian had chosen well. Antoninus ruled peacefully for twenty-three years, and had Hadrian declared a god.

When the two consul-emperors came to the throne - in 161 A.D. - the age of peace had come to an end. For almost half a century, Rome had basked in a golden age; now the barbarians were again at the frontiers. The result was that Rome’s only philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius (his fellow emperor died after eight years), had to spend most of his reign raising armies and marching to remote parts of his empire.

Marcus Aurelius was a stoic, and the stoics regarded life as a difficult voyage in which most men are shipwrecked; they felt that man’s only chance of escaping shipwreck was through reason and self-discipline. The emperor had good reason to take a stoical view of existence; he had to jot down his famous
Meditations
in his tent between battles. His wife Faustina was constantly unfaithful, and his son Commodus was a spoilt young man who became one of the worst emperors Rome had ever known. At one point, Marcus Aurelius even had to sell all the treasures in his palace to replenish the treasury. When he died at the age of fifty-nine, the task of shoring up the Roman Empire was still uncompleted. Yet the
Meditations
reveal that he had achieved the serenity of a man who knows that the key to the mystery of existence lies in the mind itself. In the murderous history of the Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius stands out like a beacon.