It is for this reason that the story of late antiquity is altogether stranger and more surprising than might at first appear. Indeed, it is precisely the measure of those who shaped it to such stupefying effect that they succeeded so well in veiling their own astounding creativity. In every period, of course, there are those who labour to redraft the past in the service of the present; but none, perhaps, has done it so potently, or to such enduring effect, as the historians of late antiquity. The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether. Whoever Moses might truly have been, and whether he even existed, most Jews’ understanding of him today has been incalculably influenced by the rabbis of late antiquity: brilliantly learned and ingenious men who devoted entire centuries of effort to demonstrating that their greatest prophet—no matter how far removed from them in time—had in fact been someone very much like themselves. Similarly, whatever Jesus might truly have believed himself to be, the Christian understanding of his mission and divinity, as taught by the vast majority of today’s Churches, bears witness to the turbulent ebb and flow of late Roman politics: to the exhaustive efforts of bishops and emperors to fashion a creed that could unite all of God’s people as one. The essential architecture of Judaism and Christianity, no matter how far back in time its ultimate origins may stretch, was designed in late antiquity.
Only faith—or the lack of it—can ultimately answer the great questions that lie at the heart of these religions: whether the Jews are truly God’s Chosen People; and whether Jesus did in reality rise from the dead. Much the same, however, could be said of other puzzles too: how and why the Jewish belief in a single god first evolved; and what might have been the full range of doctrines in the early Church. Some of the sparks that first ignited the flames of Jewish and Christian practice can be glimpsed by the historian; but many more cannot. We see through a glass, darkly—and that glass, by and large, was fashioned by the men and women who are the protagonists of this book.
Granted, it was hardly a novel paradox that veneration of a primordial past might lead to its being masked, or even obliterated altogether. Many a wealthy patron in the ancient world flaunted his piety by erecting a colossal edifice over a modest shrine. The Jewish and Christian scholars of late antiquity, however, by the sheer force of their labours, succeeded in performing an infinitely more enduring feat of renovation. Their ultimate achievement was to craft an interpretation not only of their own various forms of monotheism but of religion itself: an interpretation that billions of people now take for granted as the supreme influence affecting both their behaviour on this earth, and the eternal destiny of their souls. It is this that makes the project of sifting through the writings of late antiquity for evidence of what might actually have happened so sensitive—and so fascinating as well.
Such a project, it goes without saying, is not one to be undertaken lightly. Nor, the complexity and ambiguity of these sources being what they are, can the story that is this book’s theme be narrated without a prior explanation of how and why it is being told in the way it is.
That is why, before I embark on telling it, I pause, to tell something quite else: the making of a story.
The Greatest Story Ever Told
Winners were the favourites of heaven. Even Christians—whose god had died as a convicted criminal, nailed to a wooden cross—might succumb to this presumption. Eusebius certainly took it for granted. How could he not have done, when he had the spectacle before him of a Roman state that for centuries had been gore-streaked with Christian blood miraculously transformed into a bulwark of the Church? No need for the Caesar who had first bowed his head before Christ to wait for death to receive his due reward. Eusebius, who combined the talents of an instinctive polemicist with a profound streak of hero-worship, wrote an entire biography of the emperor, just to ram the point home. “So dear was he to God, and so blessed, so pious and so fortunate in all he undertook, that with the greatest facility he obtained authority over more nations than any who had preceded him—and yet retained his power, undisturbed, to the very close of his life.”7
Confidence in this formula—that faith in Christ would lead to earthly glory—would take a number of knocks over the course of the succeeding centuries. Awkwardly, the more Christian the Romans became, the more their empire’s frontiers seemed to contract. Theologians devised various explanations for this puzzling phenomenon—explanations which Christians, who had only to study the gospels to learn Jesus’s views on the earthly and the overweening, might well find perfectly persuasive. Nevertheless, the core equation so lovingly dwelt upon by Eusebius—that worldly greatness was bestowed by God upon those who pleased Him—appeared altogether too plausible simply to be dismissed out of hand. Instead, the more the Romans found themselves locked in a desperate struggle for survival, so the more it came to be appropriated by a new and quite startlingly upstart imperial people. The identity of these same conquerors, who had not only deprived the Romans of their wealthiest provinces but had crushed the Persians underfoot altogether, could hardly have come as more of a shock to the defeated. Indeed, so unexpected was what had happened, so utterly jaw-dropping, as to appear self-evidently miraculous. What else but the hand of God could possibly explain the conquest of the world by a people previously scorned as the ultimate in savagery and backwardness: the Arabs?
Half a millennium on from the time of Eusebius, at the start of the ninth Christian century, and the close identification made by the learned between piety and worldly power still enjoyed spectacular traction. Christians themselves might have grown uncomfortable with the notion; but not so the Arabs, who rejoiced in a rampant conviction that all their astounding victories were owed directly to the favour of God. Two centuries previously, so they believed, heaven had graced their ancestors with a stream of supernatural revelations: a dispensation that trumped those of the Jews and the Christians, and had set those who subjected themselves to it upon a road to global empire. Indeed, eight hundred years after the birth of Christ, it was as “Muslims”—“those who submit to God”—that most Arabs had come to identify themselves. The vast agglomeration of territories won by the swords of their forefathers, stretching from the shores of the Atlantic to the fringes of China, served as the ultimate monument to what God had demanded of them: their submission. “Islam,” they called it—shorthand for what had become, by the early ninth century, an entire civilisation.
It was not only the Arabs themselves, however, who had been granted a rare new dignity by the coming of Islam. So too had their language. It was in Arabic, so Muslims believed, that God had climactically, and for all time, revealed His purposes to humanity. What was good enough for the Almighty, it went without saying, was good enough for mortals. By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers. Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks. Another was said to have been flattened to a pulp when a tower of books collapsed on top of him while he was drunk. The story does not seem wholly implausible. One volume of Arab history, it is claimed, stretched to almost eighty thousand pages—which would have made for a crushing weight, to be sure. Clearly, then, a people who could boast of such titanic literary endeavours were far removed from an age that had scorned them as barbarians—as the Arabs themselves delighted in pointing out.