Such bitterness was hardly surprising. The efforts made by generations of Christian scholars to establish the truth of what Christ might have said and done had indeed been as punctilious as those of any master-mosaicist. Only the most finely calibrated measuring-rod—a canon, in Greek—had been deployed for the purpose. Just as was required by the most exacting standards of the historians of the day, no gospel had been passed as “canonical” that could not be shown, to the satisfaction of catholic scholars, to derive from the authentic evidence of eyewitnesses to the events described.67 Increasingly, only four such gospels—two attributed to disciples of Jesus; one to a disciple of Simon Peter, the chief of the apostles; and one to an associate of Paul—had come to be regarded as measuring up. Yet still, a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years after the crucifixion, biographies of Christ continued to be cranked out. Of course, gospels such as these, composed at such a remove of time, could hardly have any great claims to biographical accuracy; but biographical accuracy, to those who composed them, was hardly the point. For many writers, the motivation might be as simple as a desire to entertain, by telling fabulous stories, and filling in some obvious gaps. What kind of games, for instance, had the infant Saviour enjoyed while playing with His friends? A host of gospels had not hesitated to provide the answer.68 Christ’s favourite stunt as a child, so it was revealed, had been to make clay birds, breathe on the sculptures, and then bring them to life. Not, perhaps, quite as edifying an anecdote as those to be found in the four canonical gospels—but innocent enough, certainly. Other adjustments to Christ’s biography, however, might be altogether more momentous in their implications. Some, indeed, might strike directly at the heart of Christian orthodoxy.
When, for instance, a Christian named Basilides wished to demonstrate that Jesus had not died upon the cross, he made good the complete lack of evidence for this novel theory in the canonical gospels through a simple expedient: he wrote a whole new gospel of his own.69 The story of the crucifixion, in Basilides’s reworking of it, contained a hitherto unsuspected twist. Christ, as He was carrying His cross through the streets of Jerusalem, had magically swapped bodies with Simon of Cyrene, a man who had come to His assistance. As a result, it was the unfortunate Simon who had been crucified. Christ Himself, meanwhile, watching from a safe distance, had stood “roaring with laughter.”70
But how precisely had Basilides come by this startling revelation? No less than his adversaries, he had perfectly appreciated the vital importance of pedigree. A gospel was nothing unless it could be traced back to a heavyweight informant. This was why, in offering to the world his account of the crucifixion, Basilides had made sure to attribute it to the classiest, the most impeccable source he could find: Simon Peter himself. Critics of Basilides, however, snorted at this claim as grotesque. Any notion that details of Christ’s life and teachings might have been kept secret from his mass of followers and passed down only among a privileged few, was dismissed by them out of hand. The claims of Basilides to a privileged gnosis, or “knowledge”—one supposedly denied to less enlightened Christians—was dismissed by his orthodox opponents as the merest braggadocio. After all, as they never tired of pointing out, he was only one of a swarming, buzzing crowd. There were any number of “Gnostics,” all with their own pretensions, all with their own scriptures. “The Church has four gospels, but the heretics have many.”71 That being so, how could any of them be trusted? All were clearly fabrications. None could plausibly be attributed to an apostle. Certainly, Basilides’s laughable insistence that his gospel derived from a succession of whispered reminiscences, passed down from generation to generation and never even once put into writing, was precisely what served to brand it a fraud: “For it is evident that the perfect truth of the Church derives from its high antiquity; and that all these many heresies, being more recent in time, and subsequent to the truth, are nothing but recent concoctions, manufactured from the truth.”72
Except, of course, that any rabbi, contemplating the pretensions of the Gentile Church, might well have made an identical point. The Tanakh, after all, long pre-dated even the earliest gospel. Christian thinkers, as they struggled to establish the parameters of their faith, were often rendered profoundly uncomfortable by this reflection. So much so, in fact, that one of them, a bishop’s son by the name of Marcion, was brought by it to take the ultimate step, and deny that he owed anything to the Jews at all. Rather than acknowledge the umbilical cord that linked the gospels to the Old Testament, he simply cut right through it. Christ, so he taught, shared nothing, absolutely nothing, with the Jewish god. One preached love and mercy and occupied the upper storeys of heaven; the other issued endless laws, punished all those who did not obey them, and smouldered away in the lower reaches of the sky. Some Christians, struck by the awful logic of this, were sufficiently convinced by Marcion’s teaching to establish a whole new church; others, the majority, shrank from it in horror. All of them, though, as they wrestled with the question of who or what Christ might have been, were wrestling as well with the issue of what their relationship to the Jewish past should properly be. If Jesus were truly the Messiah, then the failure of God’s Chosen People to recognise that fact could rank only as a monstrous embarrassment. Self-evidently, however, the blame for such a scandal had to lie not with Christ but with the Jews themselves. Increasingly, then, the claim of the Gentile Church to embody the fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures required it to scorn the rival claims of the synagogues as thunderously as possible: “For I declare that they of the seed of Abraham who follow the Law, and do not come to believe in Christ before they die, will not be saved.”73 The Torah was a dung-heap; its students pickers after trash; all its great array of dictates a mere monument to desiccation. Never before had there been an attempt at disinheritance on quite so audacious a scale.
The rabbis, rather than dignify the Gentiles who would rob them of their patrimony with a direct rebuttal, opted instead to hold their noses and maintain a dismissive hauteur. “Let a man always flee,” as one of them sniffed, “from what is repellent.”74 Nevertheless, even in their mightiest strongholds, even in the yeshivas, a rising tide was lapping at their feet. The danger signs had long been there to see. Christians were hardly a novelty in Mesopotamia. Indeed, they had originally arrived on its borders around the same time as the first emergence there of the rabbis themselves. Though Paul, back in the age of the apostles, had travelled westwards—to the cities of the Greek world, and to Rome—other missionaries had soon begun to turn their gaze towards the rising sun. The roads of the Fertile Crescent, after all, were quite as open as the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean. Already, by the time of the founding of the Mesopotamian yeshivas, in the early third century AD, there had come to exist, a mere two weeks’ journey north of Sura and Pumpedita, a formidable stronghold of Christian sages—and one that lost nothing in comparison to the schools of the rabbis.