The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene

It ought to be a source of satisfaction to British Christians that our two greatest poets of the last century, T S Eliot and W H Auden, were both Anglicans, while our two greatest novelists were Catholics – Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Why this should be so might offer a fruitful research project for someone. Is it because meaning is still a significant issue for us? Words after all demand meaning, don't they? Is it because we avoid the deadness cast over language by the positivist and materialistic epistemologies of the last era, with their hatred of metaphor, which for us is like the fingerprints of God left over his world? Is it because we see human beings as infinitely valuable to the God who created us in His image – and therefore novels about the inner workings of human beings actually matter? Is it because our awareness of transcendent values means that real tragedy, as opposed to sad and painful circumstances, is still possible?

The Heart of the Matter is a tragedy constructed along Greek lines. The protagonist Scobie shares with Othello that most ultimate of tragic dooms, his own damnation. He is spurred on to it, like Oedipus, by a fatal character flaw which compels him step by step closer to that doom. In his case that flaw is his fundamental decency. He hates letting anybody down, ultimately to the point where he would sooner damn himself eternally than cause hurt to another. The bitter irony is that this decency is itself a version of the love of the Cross, that God lays down his own life in order to save us from sin and death. For Scobie is a convinced Catholic, deeply committed to his church, its values, its theology and to his God. Scobie even debates with himself, as the option of suicide becomes gradually clearer to him, whether the cross was not itself an act of self-destruction. The act that will condemn him forever is parallel to the act that God meant to save him forever.

The two people he wants to avoid letting down are his wife Louise and his lover Helen. His love for Louise died with the loss of their young daughter soon after her first communion – presumably the daughter is in a state of grace in Catholic terms and a citizen of heaven. It gradually becomes apparent as the novel progresses that Scobie was on duty in Africa at the time of her death and could not be there in England for her or for Louise. Greene never states that the grief of this loss is the source of Scobie's deep-seated unwillingness to let anyone down ever again, but it's all the more powerful because he lets us draw our own conclusion. So this sorrow, with its overwhelming sense of the duty of protecting others from pain, has invaded the marriage and choked the love that once formed its heart. Real communication and real intimacy are no longer possible, as a series of stilted exchanges between Louise and Scobie makes clear.

His lover Helen has also just endured a deeply painful loss: the ship she was sailing on was torpedoed by the Nazis, her husband of only a few weeks was killed in the shipwreck, and she was afloat in a boat on the open sea for many weeks with others dying all around her. She is washed up with the few other survivors on the shore of the colony where Scobie is a police officer. She is vulnerable, she has lost everything, she knows no-one, there are predatory men circling… Scobie wants to protect her. She is a lot younger than he is – does he see her as the daughter he failed to protect? Or does he seem them both as comfortless victims of bereavement? Against his best intentions he finds himself in bed with her, and then he cannot pull away from the relationship without letting her down as well.

All this happens while Louise is away, no longer able to stand the morale-sapping climate of the colony and the deadness of Scobie's relationship with her. But just as Scobie's relationship with Helen is beginning to develop, there comes the news that Louise is coming back, determined to re-affirm her love and support for Scobie. Now he is cruelly caught. He cannot move forward without damaging either Louise or Helen, and he cannot live with himself if he does this.

When Louise actually returns the dilemma becomes unbearable. Louise insists they go to Mass - Scobie tries to avoid this because he is not in a state of grace, he is living with unrepented sin, and therefore to take the body of Christ is to ingest his own condemnation. Scobie tries confession, but it's hopeless. The priest points out that the sacrament is invalid if he does not repent, and repentance here means being prepared to stop sinning, not the modern version where you just feel bad about it. Scobie can't repent because that means letting Helen down. The only way out is to kill himself, but Scobie is aware of the terrible damage suicide does to everyone left behind. He has to make it look like an illness so that neither Louise nor Helen will blame themselves with the terrible guilt that attaches to everyone who is close to a suicide. So his plan takes shape…

But surely the one who will be most hurt by Scobie's suicide, the one most painfully let down, is God Himself – the One who loves him to the uttermost and has given everything to have his love forever. Greene reveals the Saviour's agony in a couple of extraordinary dialogues - or interior monologues? Does it all happen in Scobie's oppressed imagination? Or is Jesus really speaking to his soul, trying to woo him away from his destruction? These passages are extraordinary, without parallel in any other literature except possibly Dostoevsky, and acutely vivid and painful for a Christian reader. Christ is portrayed as going through his agony all over again for love of Scobie, who horrifically sees himself in the crowd surrounding Jesus on the road to the Cross, mocking and beating him.

For Scobie is resolute. It is not just Louise and Helen he is letting down, it is Christ Himself. Since he cannot let himself hurt them, he cannot avoid hurting Christ either. Surely then, Christ is better off without him too? Isn't it his duty to separate himself from Jesus finally and forever, so that Jesus' pain can stop? Scobie is hunted to death by his own remorseless logic.

Pity and terror are the accounted the hallmarks of tragedy, the wellsprings of its cathartic power. The Heart of the Matter has them in spades. An utterly compelling book but desperately painful. Just because the author is a fellow Christian doesn't mean we can expect an undemanding read.

A few final observations before I go away and try to recover.

It is painful to see grace offered in such mechanical terms – upon these conditions, with these rules and exceptions, and with these inexorable consequences. Somehow grace seems to have become a new legalism of its own. Is this what Catholicism looks like from the inside? Or is it Scobie's own flaws that make it look like this to him? Is it because he is a policeman? Or is it the negative logic of Scobie's depression, that makes everything look so clear yet so cold and hopeless?

Sin is disturbingly portrayed as an atmosphere that clings to the entire West African colony. Scobie at one point even gives this as his reason for wanting to live there: at least the soul-destroying climate makes people more honest, their sins are out in the open, not politely brushed away as they are back in England. You see sin as an atmosphere creeping into the relationship between Scobie and Louise. Every time they touch each other a film of sweat forms disgustingly between them. Yet surely the sin is not in their bodily contact but in their emotional distance. Then, horribly, the same slippery sweat starts to form between Scobie and Helen too…

Silence has a huge part to play in Scobie's tragedy, to point where you feel it could have been averted if only people could have talked to each other. Three key points are:-

After his death it turns out that Louise returned to Scobie, not ignorant of his liaison with Helen but because of it, and not to rebuke him for his unfaithfulness but because she realises how lonely, grief stricken and in need of support he is. She is far more generous to him than he has imagined – she really loves him and puts his needs before his own. If only she had said, "I know about Helen, and I forgive you." But she was silent, perhaps taking her lead from his own inability to talk about it.

After the confessional Scobie goes away, not helped, but convinced that there is no way out. If only the priest had made an arrangement to meet him and talk it through, or to send him to someone who could help him. But neither of them can escape the formulaic structure that has been imposed upon grace.

Scobie's plan to kill himself depends on complete secrecy. If either Helen or Louise suspected that it was a case of suicide they would have to bear the agony of responsibility for his despair, either because of their words and actions or at least for not having been able to save him, for having loved him in vain. This would have been a worse letting down than any other. So when Scobie is at his most despairing he is least able to confide his true intentions and feelings to those closest to him. Unfortunately it is the spy Wilson, who would like to be Louise's lover, who detects Scobie's deception after he is dead, so Scobie's repressed silence turns out to have been for nothing.

In these respects then we see some advantage in our own age over Greene's – we're allowed to talk to each other nowadays, even if in practice millions have no opportunity. That openness brings its own set of problems of course, but how many tragedies must it avert.

Fourth observation is that Scobie has an after life, just as Oedipus had, albeit a half-life as a blinded exile in Oedipus at Colonnos. For Scobie that half life is in the speculations of his priest, who tells Louise after Scobie's death that Scobie really loved God and that the church may be wrong in its teaching about suicide:

            Father Rank… said furiously, "For goodness' sake, Mrs Scobie, don't imagine that you – or I – know a thing about God's mercy."

            "The Church says…"

            "I know what the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart."

A final acknowledgement then that God's grace is greater than law or than anything we know.

Review of Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Eerdmans 2006

This is a rather academic book so read no further if that's not for you. It's also an old review, I read it back in 2013, but it's message is revolutionary from a biblical studies point of view. We've all read those Da Vinci Code inspired headlines that say the Gospels have been fixed up by the church authorities, we should read the apocryphal gospels instead. Even serious journals like National Geographic have carried them. I'm sure with Easter coming up we'll get these same old stories coming out of the secular press yet again...

Bauckham does away with all that by firmly establishing the links of the Gospels with eyewitnesses from Jesus' own days. The apocryphal gospels, like the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Peter, date from 200 AD or so and clearly don't belong in the same league.

This is the first scholarly book I've read in a while that seems to genuinely want to engage with the Scriptures and find out what kind of writing they are intended to be rather than engage in a polemic for or against them (thought there is plenty of polemic against form criticism in particular as we shall see.) He has made a strong case for the use of research, especially on contemporary naming patterns, to provide worthwhile objective information about the text.

His starting point with a scholar called Papias writing as an old man in the early second century is that there is no reason why he should not have had dealings with Jesus’ younger contemporaries when they had grown older and he himself was still a young man. The assertion that Papias, in writing about his encounters with these eyewitnesses, is referring back to an earlier time in his life seems obvious, leaving one wondering why no-one has picked up on it before – perhaps they didn’t want to?

He has a great quote somewhere here – I wish I could find it, I think it was from Dodd in the 1930s – to the effect that a great deal of gospel scholarship seems predicated upon the ludicrous idea that the various people who were the sources of the gospels gave their testimony verbally and then vanished completely, leaving no check on the validity of what eventually came to be written down. The real life situation must have been that the authors of the traditions continued to be available to the early Christian community as resources to substantiate what was written and its interpretation, though in gradually dwindling numbers as death took its toll through old age, disease or persecution. This state of affairs should have persisted at least up to the time of Papias’ young adulthood. It is also an entirely plausible background to Luke’s researches in the prologues to Luke and Acts.

Bauckham’s general picture then is that there were eyewitnesses to the events described in the Gospels: that of course many of them survived for decades after those events: that they were available as a resource to the early church to recount as well as to interpret the events: and that there can be little doubt that the first Christians made use of them as sources to access stories and teachings of Jesus, including the corroboration of written accounts when they came to be produced. The presence of several sayings of Jesus in the New Testament but outside the Gospels underpins this – eg Acts 20:35, 1 Corinthians 7:10, and possibly 1 Thessalonians 4:15 – and Bauckham has some comment on this in later chapters.

His chapter on Gospel names draws heavily on the research of an Israeli scholar named Ilan who has established which names were the most commonly used in first century Palestine. The origins of the Gospels in a first century Palestinian context are clearly established by this research. Theories that the Gospels are the later creations of Hellenistic communities elsewhere in the Roman Empire, where research shows very different distributions of personal names, are no longer tenable after this: at the very least those communities will have shown a significant commitment to transmitting material from Palestinian sources with great care for accuracy.

I had in fact thought of Alexander and Rufus independently, before reading Bauckham: the only explanation for their appearance in Mark’s narrative as the sons of Simon of Cyrene is that they were familiar by name to Mark’s readers. This of course supports an early date for Mark: he describes Simon, a contemporary of Jesus, to people who know his sons. It doesn’t argue for a super-early date – where is Simon? Why aren’t Mark’s readers as familiar with him? Has he died? – but it would be reasonable to expect that perhaps two or three decades may have elapsed between the events and Mark’s record.

What did surprise me is the extent to which Bauckham attributes so many other Gospel names to eyewitnesses. Is Bartimaeus named, for example, because he became an active member of the early Christian community and a valued eyewitness? Or Jairus? Or is it simply that someone at the time took the trouble to note and remember their names? It is hard to imagine that they, or others named in the record, had no after-life, and if the impact of Jesus on them was as dramatic as is stated in the Gospels one would have to suppose that was likely to include participation in the community of his post-resurrection followers. I buy that but I can see it is difficult for people whose world view makes raising from the dead and restoring of sight problematic – more later.

The contrasting issue is that of people whose names are deliberately withheld, for example the young man who flees naked from the garden of Gethsemane, or the person who smites the ear of the high priest’s servant. Here Bauckham’s case is that these events were too dangerous for names to be put in writing. The authorities still perhaps viewed the events as a conspiracy and there may have been marked men whom they wanted to help them with their inquiries.

I have always had a soft spot though for the view that the naked youth was Mark himself, who is said in Acts 12:12 to have lived in Jerusalem and appears there as a member of the inner circle of the Way. I don’t think there is any incompatibility between this view and Bauckham’s that he might need to make sure his name does not come to the attention of the authorities – in fact all the more so as he and his family lived in easy reach of the authorities and in view of the general climate of fear in Acts 12. Nor do I see an incompatibility with Mark’s role, strongly supported by Bauckham, as Peter’s amanuensis, receiving Peter’s memoirs by dictation. This may well account for the greater focus in the narrative from Mark 11 onwards: Mark may have had some personal recollections to draw on to help him in his arrangement of Peter’s material. However I accept this is speculative.

All this argues for a fairly early date for Mark, during the period while the heat was still on. I do have a concern though, when the presence of eyewitnesses is established both by naming them and by not naming them... However I accept that I am setting up a false dichotomy here; there is no reason why both cannot be the case, provided each instance is well argued.

I was not sure what to make of Professor Bauckham’s research in to oral transmission in other non-literate cultures. He argues that research demonstrates a high level of accuracy in transmission in such cultures, provided the material is of an appropriate genre. Several genres were identified, including fable, where the gist of the story might stay the same and the art was in retelling and re-appropriating the material, through to community history where there would be dedicated practitioners whose job was to ensure that the material was passed on without loss or blemish and who would be rebuked by the whole community if they made a mistake. Verbal patterns might be used as mnemonics to assist with the process  - evidence that there are some of these in the Gospels?

The analogy with eye-witnesses to Gospel events acting as guarantors of the foundational stories of Jesus is obvious – but it is no more than an analogy. We can’t actually demonstrate that elements in the transmission of oral records in the cultures under research were identical to those in New Testament era societies – they may have differed in significant ways not accessible to us. So I think Bauckham over-claims for this. What surely can be said though, in a more minimalistic way, is that can no longer be asserted that a tradition must be inaccurately transmitted purely on the grounds that the transmission process was oral, because some oral cultures are clearly capable of maintaining a very high degree of accuracy.

Bauckham’s work on the psychology of memory I found unhelpful and unengaging. I think the aim was to show that certain kinds of event impact the memory so profoundly that they are retained very vividly for a long period of time. Details may be lost (eg it was a Wednesday, it was raining...) but other details may form an association and become very much a part of the recollection (someone ran up with a sponge, his head was on a little cushion...) But the basics of the memory, who did what, will remain powerfully present. This doesn’t guarantee though that any particular account is an accurate recollection. All it does is tell us that there is no reason why the basic elements of a story about a vivid event (“They were all astonished,” as Mark put it so often) should not be accurately retained in the memory of an eyewitness for the rest of their lifetime.

The really striking thing about Bauckham though is that he makes no mention at all of the issue that provoked the whole liberal crisis of 19^th and 20^th century scholarship. It was the enlightenment world view that led to wholesale rejection of any account of the miraculous. They followed Hume's dictum that, since miracles are contrary to the laws of nature, they cannot happen. Therefore when given an account of a miracle, we should disbelieve the narrator.

Today this dictum seems stupid: the laws of nature have turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than we thought, and we know that they are only summaries of what happens while under our observation. We therefore don't know what the laws of nature are until we have considered all available observations. It is therefore not logical or compatible with scientific method to reject observations on a priori grounds, whether those grounds are religious or philosophical. Observations belong to the category of data, laws of nature to the category of conclusions.

For nineteenth and twentieth century scholars their enlightenment background meant that Gospel studies had to start by rejecting most of the content of the Gospel – any account of miracles, prophecies etc must perforce be fiction, and must also be a late fiction, written long enough after the event for nobody to be in a position to contradict it. This led to the absolute absurdities of the Christian movement having been started by someone who never said or did anything unusual. Moreover their late dates were constantly being undercut as scholarship found earlier and earlier pieces of Gospel manuscript and were forced to accept earlier dates for other New Testament writings.

Be all that as it may, it shows how far and how suddenly the enlightenment position has collapsed that Bauckham doesn't even feel the need to mention it, let alone oppose it.

One thing I would have liked more comment on from Bauckham is the one or two NT passages that seem to give us a brief glimpse of the transmission process actually in operation. I suppose both the passages I'm thinking of are in books of disputed authorship and date and this may be a factor.

2 Thessalonians 4:15 says, "¹⁵ So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings^[a] we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter. ^[a] or traditions." Bauckham certainly does mention this verse in more than one place but I would have liked to have seen some interaction with the debate about its date and authorship, especially as the letter as a whole to my mind shows evidence of dating prior to the fall of Jerusalem in 2:4 and also shows connections with Gospel eschatological material.

2 Timothy also clearly indicates an onward transmission process in action, for example 1:13-14: "What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. ¹⁴ Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us." Surely Paul or pseudo-Paul is ensuring that transmission of this oral deposit takes place with continuity and integrity here.

The same seems to be true of 3:10 and especially 3:14: "¹⁴ But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it." This is further complemented by the constant use in the letter of memorable or trustworthy sayings, encapsulations of doctrine, warnings of the dangers of departing from the inheritance of faith, and encouragements to further remind others.

A key verse in this matter is 2:2: "And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others." The logic is clear: I passed on oral material to you, now you pass it on to others, and see that they in their turn pass it on to still others. A discussion of this could have been doubly illuminating, not only for Bauckham's own thesis on the mechanics of transmission but also reflecting back on the issues of dating 2 Timothy – how does this concern for ensuring the transmission of authentic oral traditions illuminate and fit into the overall picture of the development of the New Testament canon?

These are minor dissatisfactions with a very important and impressive book. Thank you Professor Bauckham! You have established a firm foundation for reading the Gospels as reliable historical testimony. Because of you Gospel studies have a new starting point - in the text and not in the enlightenment preconceptions of their nineteenth century detractors.

The Story of the Jews Finding the words 1000BCE-1462CE

Simon Schama

This is a gem! Schama has a wonderful gift for bringing long-lost peoples and cultures alive. The people are there in all their laments, lawsuits, loves and lurches of fortune. He's very good on Jewish mothers through the ages. He demonstrates Hebrew cultures in an incredible treasure house of nuance underscored by a deep feeling for poetry, cloth, and trades of every kind, a counterpoint of interactions with all sorts of neighbouring Gentile cultures and a love of the huge variety of ways in which it has been possible to be Jewish down the millennia.

We start with Elephantine Judaism is in chapter one. Interestingly Schama finds there already an interaction going on between the "purer" Temple-based Judaism of Jerusalem and the more pragmatic sort that adapts to local conditions and needs – they even have their own very splendid Temple in Elephantine with debates going on about what should be practised there, and the more because of the local Egyptian pagans who worshipped a ram-headed god in their temple while the Jews ritually slaughtered rams next door. It couldn't end well…

But the key thing is, these people live! Through their remains and documents, they speak to us today and their tongue is human. This is Schama's key mission. Through century after century in which Hellenisers, Romans, Crusaders, Arabs, the kings and prelates of Christendom, down to the fanatical idolaters of both Nazism and communism have demonised "The Jew," Schama aims to make this impossible by letting the Jews of history speak to us in our own human voices. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

In chapter 2 Schama relocates to Israel and strikes a powerful chord in his reflections on Judaism as a religion of the people (pages 32-33.) He sites this in the context of Nehemiah's account of the reading of the Law to the people in the newly re-walled Jerusalem. No king or high priest or Temple is present – those have all gone utterly through the disaster of conquest. The covenant being renewed is between God and His people, unmediated by any monarch or prelate but present in the words themselves as they are read out, words that demand the personal response of everyone in the crowd. In this the story echoes the narratives of the family histories of the patriarchs, the kingless days of the Exodus and the Judges, the dispute between Samuel and the people, the provisions of the Law itself that king would be subject to Law and not over it. It remains the case in the statelessness of Judaism and its putting family and synagogue at it heart rather than priest and nation.

In Chapter 3 Schama gives us a very interesting discussion between "minimalist" Israeli archaeology which wants nothing to do with any history emanating from the Bible because it rejects an older "maximalist" school which was largely interested in archaeology as a means of verifying the Bible. Schama does a great job of giving the minimalist approach full rein, to the flustered discomfort of an old-school Bible person like myself. Then he craftily chucks bits of archaeological evidence in that seriously undermine the minimalist case and makes them look like the ones who are trying to fit the evidence into pre-conceived notions (cheers from o-s B person.)

It's too much to go into all the ins and outs in what is only a review, but some of the bits that keep turning up so inconveniently have included:

·         The inscription by Hezekiah's miners who opened up the water channel that sustained Jerusalem through the Assyrian siege of approx 701 BCE. As a result Hezekiah and his court, which included Isaiah, become indisputably historical figures.

·         An exquisite little artefact with the Shema inscribed on it, predating King Josiah by centuries. The minimalist view is that the story of the unexpected finding during Josiah's reign of the Book of Deuteronomy, the book from which the Schema is quoted, was a post-exilic invention designed by the priests to explain the disaster of the destruction of Jerusalem through the failure of Judah to obey their God, but also to give hope that this same God would rebuild their society if they return wholeheartedly to Him. Finding that the Shema is much more ancient than either Ezra and post-exilic Jewry or than the stories of Josiah they looked back to does not help sustain the credibility of the minimalist story.

·         The finding of a hill fort round about where David was supposed to have fought Goliath. Apparently this fort dates back to about 1000 BCE, contains the bones of every kind of domesticated animal except pigs…

·         In this fort and elsewhere have been found models of a shrine with no idol, but a separate, empty Holy of holies, like the Temple Shrine of the invisible transcendent God.

·         They have even found at last an inscription to King David, who is treated as a myth by minimalists.

Schama rightly sticks to the archaeology in this archaeological debate. He does put in an extremely strong case for the historicity of Nehemiah, which is very obviously a first person memoir and has been shown to use the proper contemporary court style for all the Persian decrees and diplomatic correspondence it quotes. From Nehemiah we quickly find ourselves back with a pre-existent Jerusalem with named and recognisable walls, gates, Temple and quarters, and to earlier writers such as Jeremiah who then take us further back still.

But I would like to add a few thoughts of my own:

1.      What other discipline would reject so utterly a key and very ancient documentary source, corroborated in many instances by other records such as those of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians for many significant events?

2.      How do we account for the picture of an evolving society in the Bible, from the nomadic society trying to set up its first institutions of the Torah through the very loose tribal confederacies of Joshua and Judges to the proto-kingdoms of Saul and David emerging into the complex but woefully underpowered city-states of later Israel and Judah? There is even an underlying evolution in the roles of women, from Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel who are more or less co-equal to men through powerful figures such as Miriam and Deborah to the virtual disappearance of women from any role of influence other than that of a Jezebel or an Athaliah in later Judaism. What purpose did all this serve in a narrative that according to the minimalists is mostly about Judah's rebirth through acknowledgement of past failures and a return to God? Could it be that it is there because it was the best acknowledgement available as to how things actually evolved?

3.      Why would Ezra's followers bother to include so much history about Joseph, Ephraim, the eight northern tribes and the North kingdom of Israel when the main point is the rebirth of Judah? OK, they can serve as a dire warning from the past – but why such very great detail? It looks more like love and regret than a propagandist rewriting of history.

4.      Come to that, why so much failure at all? Official histories never do this: and if the Jewish one does it for a particular reason, to justify the ways of God to men, would they really hammer it home to such a discouraging extent – "what's the point of even trying since we are all such incorrigible failures and always have been?" It is one of the great testimonies to the truth of the Old Testament that it is so unflinchingly honest about the shortcomings of even its greatest heroes.

5.      Key minimalist assertions do not hold water:

a.      "We can't find any monuments or buildings that acknowledge the mighty King David." But the Bible's account is of David as a shepherd king and a warrior leader in a loose association of fractious tribes, not a king of the kind found in later city states. He is never said to have built anything: he captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites and the only building project he is recorded as really wanting to carry out, the Temple, God told him not to.

b.      "We can't find archaeological evidence for the people of Israel travelling through the desert." How would you expect to? They were nomads, camping out and gathering food and water where they could. What remains could be left?

c.       "We can find lots of evidence of idolatry of every kind – the monolithically monotheistic Jewish state of the Bible never existed." Well it never did in the Bible either, or not at least until after the exile. Almost every book of the Bible contains multiple references to idolatry practised not only by the other people who lived amongst them – and the biblical record clearly shows that most of the time Israel and Judah were very cosmopolitan societies – but also, sometimes to a massive extent, by the Jews themselves.

Finally, I wonder what to make of the repeated doubling up structure of the Bible in this context. What I mean is that it's not the first creation that works out, but the second, Noahic creation. It's not the first children of Adam and Eve that succeed – Cain and Abel – but Seth the follower. Ishmael is not the chosen one but Isaac the second born is. Esau the firstborn is a waster so his younger brother gets the inheritance. It's not Leah the first wife who matters but Rachel the second. Moses' first attempt to stand up for the Israelites is a humiliating disaster which reduces him to a shepherd for forty years but his second attempt, led by God, brings Passover and forges a new nation. The first set of commandments are broken, the second are put in the Ark. The first attempt at invading Canaan does not have God's blessing and ends in chaos, the second under Joshua succeeds. The first priesthood of Eli breaks down but the second, of Samuel who doesn't seem even to be a Levite, flourishes. The first king Saul experiences moral, spiritual and political collapse, but the second, David, is "a man after God's own heart…" and so on.

It's so pervasive. Is it a moral lesson for a much later generation – "OK, this Temple and nation aren't a patch on the first one - but the second one has God's blessing, so just you wait and see what God will do?" That would please the minimalists of course. But the really fascinating thing is the way this theme is picked up (and fulfilled?) in the New Testament. It is this more than the archaeology leads me to look for a divine purpose being worked out in Scripture as a whole: not the first Adam who sinned, but the second Adam who restores: not the first Joshua who gives an earthly kingdom but the second Joshua (Jesus is just the Greek version of this name) who brings a heavenly one, not the first Temple built of stones but the second made without hands, not the brokenness of the old creation but a new creation, not my weakness but your strength, not just the life that ends in the grave but resurrection.

Bit of a digression there, hope you enjoyed it, but back to Schama. Jesus does figure in his narrative as a real historic person, one who lived in the times of the Herods and Pilate, who had a charismatic presence but, seen as a destabilising force in a time of political uncertainty, was disposed of by the authorities. All this is hardly surprising in view of the overwhelming evidence. Schama is agnostic about what happened next, as with Montefiore in his epic Jerusalem. He sees Jesus as a revolutionary rabbi not as Messiah or as the Resurrection and the Life. He sees Trinitarianism as a complication that does not commend itself to the simpler monotheisms of Jews and Muslims.

There's a wonderful passage on page 150 (Bodley Head 2013 hardback edition) reflecting on the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in AD70:

Essentially, at this point Jewish time stops; the actuality of the Temple cult, its sacrifices and pilgrimages, become virtualised, the feasts themselves embalmed in a Judaism of loss… Judaism itself had floated free from the grave of history. It was to be a perpetual present, endlessly reanimated in memory… it was in effect… the moment when history is replaced by timeless memory.

Schama portrays a Judaism violently cut free from its embodiment in material things – a land, a city, a temple, an unending slaughterhouse of sacrificial blood – now taking off into the transcendent. Yet with that the phrase a Judaism of loss, a core of spirituality that is focussed upon what we once enjoyed but have no longer. "Next year in Jerusalem…"

Another brilliant passage is about the Mishnah (page 183 onwards.) He describes it as chatty, serious, argumentative, narrow and petty and comprehensive and sublime. Here is his strongest advocacy of it, from page 185:

There is something counter-intuitively powerful about the wiring established between quotidian habit and connection with the Almighty. From minutiae comes sanctification down to the last shoe and the locust which might be trodden underneath. The Mishnah resists the possibility separating the realms of the sacred and the humdrum: holiness pervades all; and the least action, the least creature, the least custom is to be considered in the light of the righteousness of divinity. Though dealing with small things, this is no small thing. It bestows a kind of radiance on the world itself, not through abstract nostrums but from the actual, concrete matter from which a day, a week, a life is made.

This is so brilliantly expressed that it makes you want to rush out and get a copy and read it straight away. And yet… I suspect that if I did so I might find the Mishnah slightly less brilliant than Schama makes it. I agree with the vision – to find every part of life radiant with the holy. But I would find the loss of all spontaneity in the Mishnah's search for that vision too great a sacrifice. Is divinity only about rules? Is there nothing left for freedom, for inspiration? Yes, cooking the dinner or catching the bus should be holy, lived expressions of our relationship with God. But can't we find that in joyous encounter with Him in all that we do rather than in endless prescriptions? I suspect I would find the Mishnah's vision unable to deliver this joy. There are always religious people, among Christians as well as Jews, who love rules and love imposing them on others if they get the chance.

I also feel Schama oversells some of what he has to say about Jewish imagery. I was delighted to find Judaism generally far less chary of pictures than it has latterly become, following Schama's lush descriptions of ancient synagogue interiors, full of image and colour. But some of his claims for Jewish illuminated manuscripts seem overstated. He lavishes praise on their imagination and virtuosity, but several of the illustrations in the book have a distinct air of the fourth form. You end up hoping that his other descriptions of subjects of which you personally know little are not over-egged.

But Schama certainly does make us wonder at the sheer extent and variety of Jewish civilisations down the ages in many different countries: in the Yemen, in Egypt, somewhere in the Caucasus, in Spain, in England, in various parts of Europe. Very clearly there are many ways of being Jewish! There are very affectionate portraits of Jewish women who at least among the Ashkenazi created a powerful civilisation of their own. His descriptions of Jewish sages like Maimonides and especially of the poet HaLevi are full of love for them and feeling for their achievements, like all the very best biography.

Finally the subject of Christians and Jews. Schama is excellent on just how Jewish Christianity was at the beginning. After all its Founder, its Scriptures and all its leaders were all Jewish. He portrays growing estrangement turning into rivalry and eventually enmity, a sickening story. With the rise of Islam he shows how Jews often did better under Muslim regimes than Christian ones.

It is absolutely horrible to read about the persecution of Jesus' own kin, our older brothers and sisters in faith, by people who claimed the name of Christ in justification. No Christian can read this without a deep sense of shame. At least some of the anti-Semitic mob violence at the time of the Crusades was it seems resisted by the church. Bishops and priests would protect Jews by sheltering them in cathedrals, churches and monasteries and would speak out to condemn the violence – or some of them would anyway.

But eventually lawless anti-Jewish rioting turned into official persecution by the Church through the instrument of the Inquisition. Torture, burnings and mutilation justified in the name of a loving God? Has the papacy ever issued a statement of repentance about this? Sorry is pretty weak after such horror but it is at least an improvement on keeping silence. Jesus ordered us to love our enemies, forgive them and pray for those who persecute us, so how can anyone have imagined that these persecutions could be done in His name. If the criterion of judgment is "as much as you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me," then there are a lot of popes and cardinals who have received very nasty surprises in the afterlife. I wish that Protestants had done better but then there are the appalling anti-Semitic rants of Martin Luther to bear in mind.

A complete eye-opener of a book then, both dazzling and horrifying. I can't wait to read the second volume.