Institute for Travesty

Fundamental to all influence of Judaism on Europe is the Judaic conception of deity. And by and large, that influence is buried, not in obscurity but in the totally obvious but not sufficiently studied, understood, or appreciated. The tendency is that whenever anyone moves toward such a discussion, not that people respond with a mystified incomprehension but rather with a simple, “I knew that.” For example, we all know that the Hebrew God is one, that the Jews are the great monotheists.

We have all come to know, seemingly by instinct, that God has a Personhood, that God has a personality, that God is, in fact, the primary Person of the Universe. It has been a commonplace of science that through the Creation itself and the study thereof, we come to know the character of God. For example, we all know that God is a God of regular laws which science can (often mathematically) formulate.

We all know this, but we haven’t considered it enough to know its limitations. For example, there may be regular laws, but a God who could create the whole universe may not be particularly limited to keeping the laws invariable and forever.

Moreover, we can have all the mathematically formulated laws the world can hold and still come short of explaining a God who parts the Red Sea or provides manna in the wilderness. An imminent God, by definition, interferes in the natural order at will, and science’s adherence to static law always from a Jewish God perspective carries an asterisk with it, an asterisk indicating a default condition in which God chooses to let the ordinary sum of laws operate without personal interference.

Yes, we have all known such things at some level, but not a conscious and articulate level.

In contrast, by and large, if anything the ancient world was less likely to “have known that” and considerably more likely to feel an inner need to think more sharply about what they themselves thought in contradistinction to what Judaism represented.

This complex inter-cultural recognition and perhaps competition was intensified by the Silent Years, but it didn’t start with them. The seeds had been planted earlier, possibly as far back as the Assyrian Captivity in 722 B.C. We need to recall how early such a date is—within half a century of the founding of Rome, perhaps a hundred years after Homer’s epics of the Trojan Wars and the Wanderings of Odysseus.

But to truly understand how old a time we are talking about, we must recognize something of a double vision in both real history and its understanding. As mentioned throughout this study, it concerns a time when an Old World, an old civilization, was dying and a new civilization, ultimately centered in Europe and leading to the modern world was little more than embryonic.

So, let’s try to articulate some of the things Europeans had learned over 800 years from the start of the Assyrian Captivity, and particularly and increasingly in the 400 years of Silence.

From a Jewish perspective:

1)  There is only one real God. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one” (Deuteronomy 4:6).

We all knew that by the time of Paul. Philosophers had been saying now for hundreds of years that there was only one God, but they were Greeks themselves so they invented some other kind of oneness, particularly popular being that God was a principle, perhaps the principle of number. Philosophers delighted in speculating about that oneness—we heard that and have considered it at length in a full chapter on Monotheism.

We need to go on.

2)   God cannot be represented by artists—not by painters and, Greeks, take note, not by sculptors either. Pagans all knew that by the time of Paul, but they had become so used to thinking of Zeus and Athena, Jupiter and Minerva in statues and in painting that it was very difficult to wrap their heads around a God in a different dimension entirely and so far above and beyond humanity that any anthropomorphic representation would be a blasphemous insult.

3)    God was the Creator; he was not material in Himself but instead made every material thing and all kinds of other things, all other things, as well. He had made all things, visible and “invisible.” The philosophers had rather routinely assumed that all things were material things and were the only things. In this area, the Jews and the primitive Europeans agreed more with each other than with the philosophers. The European pagan mythologies routinely recognized a creation and a Creator, or maybe several creators, behind the world as we now know it.

4)   Jews had in their own history the central event of God calling them out of Egypt and destroying much of Egypt in the process, events memorialized in the yearly Passover celebration. Greek philosophy generally discounted the possible of godly intervention in the world. If everything was material, there really wasn’t a separate deity-creator to do the intervening. Again, the Jewish conception was more related to primitive paganism where at least from time-to-time gods chose to rape human females or committed other, if less titillating, interventions in the natural order.

We knew that, but we probably missed it in passing: God’s most central intervention in the natural order was that He spoke (cf. “dumb” idols—who don’t and can’t speak.) That, after all, is inherent in His calling the Hebrews out of Egypt. Moreover, from many references, God expected not only to speak but to be accurately quoted. False quotation was punishable by death in Judaism, but there was also substantial evidence that God could take the law into His own hands with human beings speaking their own words but attributing them to God.

An important consequence, that no doubt influenced Jewish-Gentile relations throughout the Silent Years, was simply: If God wrote it, the Jew ought to be able to read it. Literacy was a characteristic Jewish trait in the Silent Years, just as literacy would become a characteristic trait of German Protestants after Martin Luther and just as literacy in 17^th century New England meant an immediate interest in establishing what became Harvard College, preparatory education at the Hopkins schools in the Connecticut Valley, and public-school education at Dedham, MA.

5)   God could and did play favorites. From the Jewish Scriptures themselves, God chose the Jews. In the prophetic tradition, in the end, God would reign, and the Jews would reign with Him. Europeans knew that by 50 A.D. Presumably they didn’t like it, but they knew it. Primitive pagan gods could also play favorites, as, for example, fully demonstrated in partisan gods in the Iliad. Philosophers typically didn’t consider godly partisanship because their vague one god was also non-involved with the world.

6)   God had definite moral preferences. The philosophers wanted to think it all through and come up with their moral preferences. If God was remote, there was really a need for a new branch of knowledge to summarize these philosophically determined moral preferences, and thus was born the major sub-field of philosophy called Ethics.

From a Jewish perspective, what was right was not what philosophers could think up but what God had written down. Hammurabi had come up with his Code in the Old World long before the nascent Greek philosophers. According to the Jews, God came up with His own code known as the Ten Commandments that to some extent went along with Hammurabi. Ultimately, however, it was the Ten Commandments that Ethics would have to compete with.

Pagan deities were much more vague about morals. It was a good idea not to offend the gods, but it could be exceedingly unclear what offended them. Thus, pagan religion was centered on propitiating the gods, getting them on one’s own side and off being teed with whatever might happen to tee them.

7)     God was definitely partial about people and about morals. It turned out He was also partial about numbers. The number 7, for example, seemed to particularly represent Him. In creation, for example, He had worked for six days and rested for one. 70 was another special number and suggested that 10 must be special as the multiplier of 7. 40 was another special number. Get good enough at understanding the Jewish scriptures, and you might even know the difference between 40 and 70. Some people in Europe by 50 A.D. seemed to have known that. A great many other people probably had no idea about number preference.

There were many more contrasts between Jewish ideas of God and pagan conceptions, but these seven give some sense of the remarkable range of contrasts that European pagans confronted as Jewish Diasporan populations spread. It can probably be assumed that the shock waves came in fairly disjointed observations rather than as any systematic presentation of Jewish alternative ideas.

Note in particular that the seven above-mentioned differences about the Jewish God don’t start to deal with very important attributes like mercy, grace, compassion, love, provision, guidance, peace, kindness, forbearance, justice and the like. In every single case, all of these more specific attributes depend on God being a self-revealing God, not a God invented by Man, the Measure of all Things.

And, of course, if God is self-revealing, He is a God who reveals himself through prophets who are not thinkers for themselves but, rather, scribes taking down dictation. Again, there are more similarities between Judaism and ancient paganism in which there were Sybils and Delphic Oracles than between Judaism and advanced philosophic thinkers.

As has been previously cited, the great contrast throughout the Silent Years didn’t emphasize the contrast between primitive paganism and Judaism. The great tension-filled conflict was between philosophically advanced Athens and Jerusalem.

Almost from the beginning, primitive paganism had been unable to seriously compete. Particularly in this sense, Greek philosophy came to the rescue of European self-esteem. The philosophers were aware of the new Jewish ideas, aware of primitive paganism’s inability to articulate any strong alternative.

And thus, whether consciously or unconsciously, the philosophers attempted to start over with hints from Judaic thought but at the same time with every intent to glorify man as the measure of all things and thus man’s “rational mind”—whatever that might turn out to be—as the determiner of reality.

That’s the overview: a shocking, in-depth alternative view of Deity, and with that, of course, an entirely different understanding of the world itself and of humanity’s range of possible roles within that world.

One can easily sympathize with the Europeans. And Western culture has always appreciated Greek pluck and invention in coming up with new approaches to philosophic issues.

More practically, throughout the Mediterranean, local political Establishments were solidly and centrally entrenched in pagan ritual. The pragmatic Romans routinely chose to side with local Establishments in their quest to establish a general Mediterranean peace.

An easy-going pagan consensus was very governmentally and socially useful. An infinitely challenging series of Judaic, sophisticated and deeply historical alternatives wasn’t something the Roman government felt it needed. As early as the Silent Years, the Romans may have deferred to and acquiesced in Greek cultural dominance partly in recognition of the Greeks’ key role in the pagan defense against Judaic ideas.

The Silent Years in one sense end with that consensus deference to Greeks and to their philosophic inventiveness. That, however, sells the Romans short and particularly sells short The Princeps, The First Servant of Rome. Caesar Augustus was a very great man, who, as the architect of the Pax Romana, had brought peace after a century of civil war while Rome simultaneously conquered the world.

One of Augustus’ greatest virtues was that he had remarkably clear insight into the nature of the world around him. He recognized that world as terribly tired, teetering really, and in desperate need of rest if it was to go on at all. Augustus arranged for a masterfully artful subterfuge that changed the entire governmental constitution of Rome while all the while proclaiming that Augustus was the savior of the Roman Republic. In that fiction the world settled down to a long rest of Roman Peace.

In that peaceful resolution, Augustus had a key motto, “Make haste slowly.” It was wise advice for a tottering world.

Ironically, a few years later, the inter-Testamental period ended, and the world sped forward in ways that make B.C. to A.D. the great turning point for dating history.

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