Even as it was, there were converts. In an age where more Jews spoke Greek than Hebrew, it was perfectly possible for a Greek – or indeed anyone else – to become a Jew. Nowhere was this more evident than in Alexandria, the original cosmopolis; but increasingly, wherever there were synagogues, there converts were to be found as well. In Rome, where the elite’s suspicion of foreign cults had long been the measure of their appeal among the masses, suspicions of this trend were particularly strong. Conservatives did not need to consult the Torah to recognise the fundamental incompatibility of the Jewish god with those of their own city. ‘The first lesson absorbed by converts is to despise the gods, to renounce their country, and to view their parents, their children and their brothers as expendable.’76 Jews were hardly alone in dreading where a multi-cultural world might lead.
A tension that had always existed within Jewish scripture was being brought to a head. How was the deity whose words and deeds it recorded best understood: as the God of the Covenant or as the Creator of all humanity? The question had long been brewing; but the rise to greatness of a dominion as globe-spanning as Rome’s could not help but give it an added urgency. Mutual suspicion between Jews and Gentiles – all the various other peoples of the world – co-existed with an equally mutual fascination. The wilderness east of Jerusalem, where men gathered among lonely hills to live in accordance with the Torah, and to tend a hatred of the unrighteous, had its counterpoint in Alexandria, where Greek-speaking scholars of Moses might have no hesitation in expressing admiration for Roman order, or hailing Augustus as ‘an instructor in piety’.77 Just as the Pharisees dreamed of an Israel become a nation of priests, so were there scholars who imagined peoples everywhere brought to obey the laws of Moses: ‘barbarians, and Greeks, the inhabitants of continents and islands, the eastern nations and the western, Europe and Asia; in short, the whole habitable world from one extremity to the other’.78
Perhaps, far from speaking of God’s anger, the absorption of the Jews into the universal empire ruled by Augustus signalled something very different: the imminent fulfilment of his plan for all humankind.
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* It is possible that the categorisation of the various Jewish holy books – what Jews today call the Tanakh and Christians the Old Testament – derived originally from the way that they were catalogued in the Library of Alexandria.
† At this stage, the Jewish collection of sacred writings was yet to correspond fully to what Jews today would recognise as the Tanakh. The phrase ta biblia ta hagia first appears in 1 Maccabees 12.9.
* The worship of Yahweh in the form of a bull is attested by 1 Kings 12.28 and Hosea 8.6. The description of Yahweh coming from Edom appears in the Song of Deborah – a hymn that most scholars identify as one of the oldest passages in the Bible.
* It is telling, perhaps, that the author of Chronicles, a history of Israel written in the fourth century BC, does not describe an Israelite conquest of Canaan. ‘Israel’s presence in and right to the land is presented as an unproblematic and established fact’ (Satlow, p. 93).
† Jericho, the walls of which supposedly came tumbling down before the trumpets of Joshua’s army, had in reality been lying abandoned for centuries before the supposed date of the Israelite army. Gibeon, which in the Book of Joshua supplies the Israelites with ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ (9.21), was founded well after the Bronze Age.
* In Deuteronomy, Sinai is referred to as Horeb.
III
MISSION
AD
19: G
ALATIA
Five years after the death of Augustus, the dignitaries of the Koinon Galaton – the ‘Galatian Commonwealth’ – met in solemn convocation. Loyal to the memory of the Caesar who now, alongside his divine father, reigned in heaven, they looked to honour him as their Saviour and Lord. As elsewhere in the empire, so in Galatia: there was peace and order where before there had always been war. The Galatians, for most of their existence, had been a people largely defined by their aptitude for violence. Three centuries before the death of Augustus, twenty thousand of them, migrants from distant Gaul, had swarmed across the straits from Europe into Asia Minor, a land celebrated for the wealth of its cities, the softness of its citizens, and the talents of its celebrity chefs. Here, in the central highlands of what is now Turkey, the Galatians had quickly carved out a new home for themselves. What the mountains lacked in resources they had more than made up for in location. Barren though Galatia was, it was ideally placed for launching raids on neighbouring kingdoms. Tall, red-haired and prone to fighting in the nude, the Galatians had made their living out of ‘their talent for inspiring terror’.1 Not for nothing was one of the three tribes that together constituted their kingdom named the Tectosages: the ‘Searchers after Loot’.
But then the legions had appeared on the scene. Rome briskly put an end to the Galatians’ roistering tradition of banditry. In due course, after a century and more of clientage, they were deprived by Augustus of even the figleaf of independence. The borders of the new province were extended far beyond those of the original kingdom; colonies filled with retired soldiers planted across its southern reaches; roads scored through the mountains and desert plains. Engineers, taming the savagery of the landscape, had set the seal on a great of pacification. The Via Sebaste, a mighty gash of stone and compacted gravel that snaked for four hundred miles across the length of southern Galatia, served the province as both guarantor and symbol of Roman might. The road was worthily named: for Sebastos, in Greek, meant ‘Augustus’. Merely to travel it was to pay homage to the Divi Filius: the Son of a God who, by his exertions and his wisdom, had ushered humanity into a golden age.
And even now, despite his death, he had not abandoned the world. In this conviction, the cities of Galatia could find a shared sense of identity and purpose. The need for this was great. The order that Augustus had brought to the region served to dizzy as well as to settle. Once, back in the swaggering days of their independence, chieftains had gathered in oak glades and feasted beneath the stars, and offered up garlanded prisoners in sacrifice to their gods; but no longer. Now the Galatians lived in marble cities of the kind that their ancestors had delighted in raiding, in a province dotted with Roman colonies, where the common language was Greek. No longer could the Koinon Galaton define itself exclusively in terms of its past. Instead, the three Galatian tribes had come by a new marker of identity. The title of Sebastenos – ‘favoured by Augustus’ – had been bestowed on them by Caesar himself. To pay honour to their divine patron was, then, for the Galatian elite, no matter of mere expediency, but a deeply felt obligation. This was why, five years after his ascension into heaven, it was decreed that Augustus’ own account of his career, which in the year of his death had been inscribed on bronze tablets and attached to his mausoleum in Rome, should be reproduced across Galatia.2 One transcript was carved into the wall of a newly consecrated temple to Rome; another etched in red down the piers of a triple-arched gateway; another adorned with statues of the Divi Filius and assorted members of his family on horseback. To visit the cities of Galatia was constantly to be reminded of the sheer scale of Augustus’ achievements. His birth had set the order of things on a new course. War was over. The world stood as one. Here, so inscriptions proclaimed to a grateful people, was Euangelion – ‘Good News’.*