- 1 day ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Piano music
02:00Why aren't these bits of Syrian glass?
02:02Look at that, brought here all the way from Syria, the glassworks of Damascus.
02:07Actually, there's plates with stamped decoration on them.
02:12Perhaps they came from Italy.
02:14Lovely bits of faience.
02:16The Romans, too, took up the Egyptian faience, blue like the Egyptian sky.
02:20They loved it for table decorations, putting their dates and pomegranates and things like
02:24that in.
02:25Look at that, as light as a feather, desiccated by the desert air after thousands of years.
02:31A piece of a Roman comb.
02:32You can almost see the matron's white hairs gathered up around it.
02:38So, you can see that, really, these little crusty hills here are like time capsules, and
02:43inside are ancient people's lives, everything they ever had.
02:47And this place, in fact, is a very special place, because here, quite close to here, the oldest
02:55bits of the New Testament in the world have been found.
02:58In towns, you can see that when you excavate them, they look just like this one.
03:03There are dozens of these towns in Egypt at the edge of the desert.
03:21Towns with names like Karanis, Oxyrhynchus, Crocodilopolis.
03:272,000 years ago, they were well-to-do Greek colonies.
03:33The real archaeological treasure here is in this funny-looking dirt stuff.
03:38The archaeologists that came here were looking for papyri, and they were looking for a very
03:43special layer.
03:44There's a bit of it here.
03:45It's what the local people called the Akvsh.
03:48And you can see, this is ancient straw preserved in it.
03:52And this is quite soft here, and it's not acidic like the dark soils above, and it's not hard
03:58like the floors below.
03:59And in this tiny little layer, this is where all the papyri were found.
04:03And actually, the amazing thing was that the first discovery they announced for the world,
04:09a really important discovery, was of a gospel.
04:13But it wasn't the gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
04:15It was the gospel of Thomas.
04:18Completely new collections of sayings of Jesus came out at the turn of the century, and by
04:22the 1920s, one of these sayings, cleave the rock and you will find me, found its way into
04:27the English hymn book.
04:32But perhaps the most extraordinary discovery came a few years later.
04:36That was when somebody discovered that a tiny little fragment of a papyrus that had come
04:41from one of these towns was much older than they previously thought.
04:44You see, ancient handwriting you can take more or less like modern handwriting.
04:47And this piece of writing could be dated to about 130 AD.
04:52Now, the most extraordinary thing about it was, it was a piece of the gospel of John.
04:56And the date made it the oldest piece of the gospel of John, the oldest piece of the New
05:00Testament, indeed, ever found.
05:02And so it has remained.
05:04And it's rather apt that with all the surprises and amazing things that had come out of this
05:07desert, especially to do with the New Testament, it bears the words,
05:12Well, I don't know what Pontius Pilate thought about truth, but I do know that when I visit
05:35the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, that whole question of truth is the first thing
05:40that pops into my mind.
05:43Jesus, from the mother, is the king of the youth.
05:47Where Christ was crucified, they put the cross.
05:50There is a hole where the cross was stood.
05:54You can feel it.
05:55You can put your hand.
05:58Go inside.
06:04According to the New Testament, two things happened when Jesus died.
06:08In the minute that he died, an earthquake happened.
06:10And then there, a crack was created in the rock.
06:13And over there, we can feel today the original crack in the rock.
06:16In the original rock that the old marble covers today.
06:18This was to be his mother and Mary Magdalena.
06:20Yes, Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalena.
06:23Gorgeous.
06:24On your right-hand side, you can see the tomb of Christ.
06:28Also, you can see a small altar.
06:32This altar represents the rolling stone that used to block the entrance to the tomb.
06:38Then they took the body of Jesus and wound it in linen clothes, as in the manner of Jews is to bury.
06:56In the place where he was crucified, there was a garden.
06:59And in the garden, a new sepulchre, wherein was man never yet laid.
07:05Well, the place of crucifixion in the tomb of Jesus, the faithful believe actually in this church.
07:14People that come here, and they see the sacred sites, and they come here to pray,
07:18actually then move in the landscape of the New Testament.
07:21They're actually moving into the landscape of a book.
07:25And what a book.
07:26It's a book that's really given shape and form to Western civilization.
07:30Christendom.
07:32Christendom, the lands of Christ, Jesus Christ.
07:35Well, are the four Gospels which have him as his hero, are they true?
07:42Or are they just a con?
07:43Perhaps something invented by the church to get money out of people?
07:46Or are they the word of Almighty God?
07:50Who wrote those four Gospels?
07:52Who put them together?
07:54Where did they come from?
07:55What about this man, Jesus Christ?
07:57Is he true?
07:57Is he a real historical figure?
08:00Well, there's something I can say right away.
08:03And that is, whoever wrote this book really understood ancient Palestine.
08:08It understood the landscape, and it understood the ancient people, too.
08:25when you come to Galilee.
08:35He was everist.
08:35He was an important thing.
08:37Got a book on papa.
08:38He was an important thing.
08:42He laughed at in Delaware.
08:43ended by a magical gold in the area.
08:45He afterwards.
08:47He wished forogue about how He sounds to America.
08:49He testified to God's meget speaking.
08:50You mean, this would've said to meенно,
08:51do you remember how He was equipped even repente for the occult?
08:53When you come to Galilee, you quickly realise that the people who wrote the Gospels really knew this area.
08:59They knew its landscape, they knew its plants, they knew its crops.
09:02And there Jesus, the Jesus they describe, was a countryman from here too.
09:07A real countryman.
09:08When he talks about the lilies of the field, that's the poppies and the little daisies that grow around Galilee.
09:13When he talks about the lilies of the field, he compares them with great Solomon, the king of Jerusalem.
09:19All his stories are about planting and sowing and the fish from the lake and things like that.
09:24I suppose really, that's how the people of Jerusalem saw the Galileans.
09:30There was a traditional north-south divide.
09:33The people of Jerusalem saw the northerners as thick, people with heavy accents, a bit slow.
09:40There were sort of Galilean jokes going around the place.
09:42And in their term, the Galileans saw the Jerusalemites as soft southerners.
09:48Hellenized, didn't think much of the priests.
09:50The Galileans were fervent nationalists, big fighters for freedom.
09:53And they had holy men, quite unorthodox, quite unorthodox holy men, who actually talked directly to God.
10:04Now, we know all that about the Galileans, because there were lots of Jewish books written at the time that tell us what was going on.
10:11But none of them mentioned Jesus of Nazareth.
10:14There isn't any record of him until long after he's supposed to have died.
10:18On the other hand, this is a real enough ruin.
10:37It's probably the ancient town of Capernaum, and that's as much a part of the New Testament as the lilies of the field and late Galilee.
10:48Actually, it's an ancient fishing village with a synagogue in the middle.
10:52Some of Jesus' disciples were fishermen.
10:58Peter lived at Capernaum, the Gospels tell us, and Jesus stayed in his house.
11:04No wonder Christian archaeologists have been so keen to dig the place up.
11:08Archaeologists started work here about 80 years ago on the most impressive bit.
11:24The ruins of a synagogue made of imported stone that had been parked like a great white Cadillac in the middle of the village.
11:38Since those days, a succession of Franciscan archaeologists have worked here.
11:47Brother Wendelin, Father Godence, and Father Vigilio, all working with great piety and special care.
11:54And they found some lovely things.
11:56What the archaeologists discovered as they dug away the foundations of the synagogue
12:12was that the great white synagogue, great white building, had been fitted very carefully onto an earlier wall.
12:22Now, this was quite exciting, because that synagogue was 2nd century,
12:24and it looked from the fragments and things they found in the older wall
12:28that it could be 1st century.
12:30In other words, it could be from the age of Jesus.
12:34Do you remember, in the Bible, a certain centurion who lived in Capernaum,
12:39whose servant Jesus cured with a miracle?
12:42But do you remember, in that story, the elders go to Jesus
12:45to ask him to cure their centurion's servant,
12:48because the centurion has been good to them.
12:50He's built their local synagogue.
12:51Now, if the archaeology of this wall has been correctly assessed,
12:57and if the Gospels are telling us the truth,
12:59that could well be the synagogue that the centurion built.
13:04And if that's so, it could be that the pavement underneath it,
13:08and the town that's associated with it,
13:10is the town of Jesus himself.
13:11So these black basalt walls are the remains of little houses.
13:26Could they be where Jesus' friends and disciples had lived,
13:29where he miraculously cured a paralysed man?
13:32Take up your bed and go to your own house, he says in the Gospels.
13:38As the fathers dug through this village,
13:40they were rolling back 2,000 years of time.
13:45When they started working in this area here,
13:49well, they really couldn't have believed their luck, I expect,
13:51because they came across something very unusual for such a simple site.
13:55They came across these huge octagonal walls, one inside the other.
14:01Now, from the pottery, they knew that these were 4th or 5th century.
14:06But from the shape of the walls themselves,
14:07they knew they'd come across the foundations of an early church.
14:11They carried on working.
14:13And in the middle of that,
14:15it was now under that tin roof over there,
14:17they found a yet earlier church.
14:19It was about 100 years earlier, they thought.
14:21And the walls had been very beautifully plastered.
14:24And although the plaster was a bit rotten,
14:26there were still hundreds of inscriptions on it,
14:28and these could all be read.
14:29And in amongst the names there were the names of Jesus Christ
14:32and the names of Peter himself.
14:35They must have felt that they were slowly coming down
14:37on the very house of St Peter himself.
14:47As the Franciscans dug up the earth floor,
14:50the centre of the house,
14:53they found fragments of things
14:56that when they glued them together,
14:57looked like this.
14:59It's a little pottery lamp.
15:00And the interesting thing about it
15:01is that unlike all other ancient pottery lamps,
15:04it's been made on a potter's wheel.
15:06Look, you can see that lovely round shape,
15:08spinning little shape,
15:09they're very spun on the wheel.
15:11And a little bit where the wick comes out,
15:14we can still see them.
15:15This one, it's got soot on it.
15:16It's stuck on afterwards.
15:17Now, these lamps were only made in a very special time.
15:21They were made, really, in the time of King Herod.
15:25And when Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD,
15:28they absolutely stopped.
15:29So these lamps are almost contemporary
15:31with Jesus Christ himself.
15:34They didn't find much else in the house.
15:36There was absolutely no domestic pottery.
15:38Even though this had been a kitchen or a family room,
15:41there was no domestic pottery.
15:43It was a couple of fish hooks.
15:44Were they the fish hooks of St Peter?
15:46Who knows?
15:47The walls were perfectly plastered,
15:49which was unique in the whole house.
15:50And they'd been plastered and painted many, many times.
15:53And that was unique in the whole village.
15:56Now, they had found a house of the right period,
15:59and they'd found special care and attention
16:01and special cleanliness inside the room.
16:03But could it be the house of St Peter?
16:05Well, the friars had no doubt.
16:07They actually entitled their archaeological publication
16:10The House of St Peter.
16:17Now, usually, archaeological reports
16:20are considered to be scientific documents.
16:22That means they've got to have proper scientific titles.
16:25Now, The House of St Peter
16:27is not a proper scientific title.
16:30The archaeologists, the good friars,
16:32have found nothing in that house at all
16:33which actually could prove
16:35that Peter had lived there at that time.
16:39So, although their book looks like a scientific report,
16:43it really isn't one at all.
16:46And all the other archaeologists
16:48that worked in the Holy Land told them so, too.
16:50All the things that had been excavated in the ancient house,
16:54the pottery, the fishhooks, and all the rest of it,
16:57were of the time of St Peter.
16:59On that, everybody was agreed.
17:02But only the friars' booklet said
17:05that the ancient house had been St Peter's.
17:07Nothing they'd found there had proved it.
17:11All the inscriptions with Peter and Jesus' name on them
17:14had been made by Christians hundreds of years later.
17:17The only thing the fathers had proved
17:22about St Peter at Capernaum
17:24was the power of their own belief.
17:35You know, the story of Jesus and Capernaum,
17:40the way history and the gospel
17:41seem to move closer and closer together,
17:44and suddenly at the last moment
17:45seem to pull apart.
17:47Well, you can repeat that
17:48dozens of times with other gospel stories.
17:51It's almost deliberate.
17:52It's almost as if the writers of the gospels
17:54refused to connect history and their faith together,
17:57as if they wouldn't degrade their faith in the Lord
18:00with mere historical fact.
18:03Actually, even mere historical fact
18:06requires some degree of faith.
18:08Take Alexander the Great, for example.
18:09There's a well-known historical figure for you.
18:11Well, there's three or four semi-fabular,
18:15sort of part-legendary biographies of him.
18:18That's all, really.
18:19But what there is, what the man has left,
18:21is his effect.
18:23His armies built Greek temples
18:24practically on the borders of India,
18:26where he'd taken them to.
18:27His policies had reorganised all the ancient world.
18:30That's why, at the end of the day,
18:31we know that he lived, that he was a real man.
18:33And that, too, I suggest,
18:36is why we can say that Jesus was a real man and lived.
18:39It's the effect of him, the effect of him, that counts.
18:42The fact that shortly after his death,
18:44there was churches everywhere,
18:45that gospels were being written.
18:47That's how we know that there must have been
18:48some energy at the centre of all that.
18:51But Jesus, unlike Alexander, was a humble man.
18:55Alexander's dad was a king, he was a king.
18:56There were coins, there were court things.
18:59Everything to do with Alexander was on a higher level.
19:02Jesus, however, the humble man,
19:05lived in a little fishing village.
19:06We don't know the names of anybody who lived in Capernaum.
19:08It would be unreasonable to find written documentation
19:11of Jesus or Peter the fisherman.
19:13We shouldn't expect to find it.
19:16Ordinary lives of humble people.
19:18What we can say is from those houses,
19:20from that village, from the gospels themselves,
19:23came such an effect that we can say
19:25that Jesus was a real historical figure.
19:32If we say that Jesus really lived,
19:44then at last we can begin to fit him
19:46into the history of his own times.
19:49And you do it like this,
19:51there are about 360 stories in the gospels.
19:54Let's see how they fit into real historical
19:57first-century Palestine.
19:59Ancient Palestine,
20:00where the Jews were governed by the Romans.
20:06What would have happened, for example,
20:08if a real guy had turned up in the temple of Jerusalem
20:11in Jesus' time
20:12and had a punch-up with the money changers?
20:15What would people have thought
20:17about the idea of a god being your father?
20:20Our father, which art in heaven, Jesus says,
20:23would it have made him popular?
20:25Would it have got him arrested or what?
20:29It's a great historical game
20:31fitting Jesus into history.
20:32It's been going on a long time, too.
20:41The trouble is
20:42that the gospels tell us
20:44that the length of time
20:45from Jesus' baptism in the River Jordan
20:47to his crucifixion in Jerusalem,
20:49the span of his entire career on earth
20:52was just three years.
20:55And that's a very small period of time
20:57in ancient history.
20:58There's not much to go on.
21:01I think at the end of the day,
21:03you can say now
21:04that historians have a little
21:05sort of set of rules
21:06that you can say about Jesus
21:07that are true historical facts about him.
21:11It's based on a lot of scrupulous research
21:13about the Roman Empire
21:14and the accuracy of the gospels
21:16and how the words in the gospels themselves
21:19deal with certain civil and civic facts.
21:23Now, historians themselves
21:25wouldn't claim, for example,
21:26the resurrection or the miracles.
21:28But what they claim is
21:29when this man lived,
21:31that as a man preaching the things he did,
21:34walking on the earth
21:35and coming into contact
21:36with the civil military authorities
21:38that he came in contact,
21:40that there is a likelihood
21:41that these things are true of the man.
21:43It's what you can call
21:44the historian's creed, if you like.
21:47And it's fairly short
21:48and fairly simple.
21:49It goes something like this.
21:51Jesus lived in Galilee.
21:54He preached, he healed,
21:56he had followers,
21:57he came to Jerusalem,
21:58he argued with the temple authorities,
22:00and he was crucified by the Romans.
22:03And that, they would tell you,
22:04is what you can know
22:05about this unknowable man.
22:07Nowadays, a lot of historians think
22:30that Pilate's residence in Jerusalem,
22:34where civilians would have been brought for trial
22:35before the Romans.
22:38Would have been the old palace of King Herod.
22:40And that's buried today
22:42here in the pretty Arab remains of the citadel.
22:45There you can still see
22:46the great massive walls
22:48of Herod's original palace.
22:50The same walls
22:51that every Jew brought for trial here
22:54would have seen
22:54in the days of Pontius Pilate.
22:56It's very strange
23:10that exactly at the moment
23:12when you could expect
23:14to find Jesus entering history,
23:16when the very Son of God,
23:18the Gospel writer's Son of God,
23:19is on trial for his life
23:21before a Roman civil court,
23:23it's very strange
23:24that at that moment,
23:25when you should be closest to him,
23:27when faith and civil law
23:29almost seem to meet,
23:31that the figure seems to dissolve.
23:33I suppose that could be
23:34not only because
23:36the way the actual trial
23:37is reported in the Gospels
23:38is very enigmatic and strange,
23:40but also because
23:41the people of Jerusalem
23:43were divided up
23:44into so many different factions
23:45that each one
23:46would have had a different Jesus.
23:48Just think of some of the people
23:49around in Jerusalem.
23:51There were Jesus' own disciples.
23:52Now, he was to them
23:53the Messiah
23:54sent to redeem the world.
23:56There were zealots,
23:57religious fundamentalists,
23:58and they were looking
23:58for a Messiah too,
23:59but a military one
24:00to kick the Romans out.
24:02Then there were
24:03the Jerusalem priests
24:04who knew a lot about Jesus.
24:06He was a man
24:07who'd been preaching
24:07that you didn't need
24:08to go to their temple,
24:09you didn't need to offer
24:10in their temple
24:11to achieve redemption.
24:14He then was attacking
24:15their authority
24:16and their meal tickets.
24:17They'd have been very pleased
24:18to see him in trouble
24:18with the Romans.
24:20For Pilate, of course,
24:21the man in front of him,
24:23well, lonely and strange
24:25as he was,
24:26was another Messiah.
24:27He'd already crucified several
24:29and would crucify several more.
24:30It really didn't matter
24:31much to him at all.
24:33So think of all those people
24:34who wanted Jesus dead
24:36or martyred
24:37or going up to heaven
24:38or something.
24:40And those are just
24:40some of the opinions
24:41that would have surrounded Jesus
24:43as he was led out to execution.
24:46And that's just
24:47a reconstruction of events
24:49based on a mixture
24:50of the gospel stories
24:51and the tough political realities
24:53of the day.
25:01As he walked down
25:02this narrow lane
25:03that leads from Pilate's palace
25:05to the Rock of Calvary,
25:07Jesus would have been
25:07the focus of an enormous range
25:09of passions and opinions.
25:13The newspapers of the day
25:14could have given us
25:15very different points of view.
25:20The gospels, of course,
25:22written later on
25:23by men who thought
25:24that Jesus was the son of God.
25:26where in all this
25:31is reality,
25:33is real history?
25:36Where can you find the truth?
25:38Christ, hanging here on his cross
26:03upon the Rock of Calvary,
26:04has moved right out of earthly realities.
26:08He's moved from fact to faith.
26:11He hangs in the future,
26:12in the present,
26:13in the past.
26:15And all around the silent figure,
26:18men have made so many choices,
26:20seen him in so many different ways.
26:22And we only know of the man
26:25from the gospels.
26:27And they were written
26:28generations
26:29after he'd been crucified
26:30and buried.
26:36So Jesus of Nazareth
26:38was enshrined in a book.
26:42The four gospels told the world
26:43that he was Jesus Christ,
26:46the risen Lord.
26:46But who wrote these gospels?
26:54Were they really written
26:55by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?
26:59And when and where
27:00were they composed?
27:08One of the very oldest traditions
27:10of the Christian church
27:11tells us that St Mark
27:13took water from this spring
27:14and that he used the water
27:16to mix the ink
27:17to write his gospel
27:18and that he wrote his gospel
27:20here
27:20to the dictation
27:22of St Peter the Fisherman.
27:25This old cave
27:27is cutting the cliffs
27:29high above the site
27:30of ancient Antioch,
27:32right at the tip
27:32of modern Turkey.
27:35Church traditions
27:36say that this little grotto
27:39is actually
27:40the oldest church
27:41in the world.
27:44You know,
27:49in the time of Christ,
27:52along with Rome
27:53and Alexandria
27:54in Egypt,
27:55this city, Antioch,
27:56was the greatest city
27:58in the world.
28:00And what a city it was,
28:02what a reputation it had.
28:03This is where Antony
28:04bought Cleopatra
28:05for their sort of a honeymoon.
28:07Also had a very large
28:08Jewish population.
28:10After all,
28:12Palestine, Jerusalem,
28:13it's not too far
28:14down the coast from here.
28:15So when the book of Acts
28:16says that when the first
28:18Christians in Jerusalem
28:19were persecuted,
28:20as Jews,
28:21it wouldn't be surprising
28:21that they upped their sticks
28:22and came here
28:23and joined the Jewish community.
28:26Church tradition again
28:27tells us that in Antioch,
28:29Christians were first
28:30called Christians,
28:32that is not the followers
28:33of Jesus
28:33or some other thing.
28:34So you see,
28:43old Antioch
28:44has a very important place
28:45in early Christianity.
28:47That lovely story
28:48of St Mark and his ink
28:49could well be true.
28:52The trouble with that is
28:54that there's an equally
28:57strong tradition
28:58that says that
28:59what St Mark really did
29:01was went to Rome
29:02with St Peter
29:03and there it was
29:04that Peter
29:05dictated his gospel.
29:08And then,
29:09after Peter was martyred,
29:11the story says
29:11that Mark then
29:12travelled to Alexandria
29:13where he wrote
29:13the final draft
29:14of his gospel.
29:16So,
29:17for every single tradition
29:19and strong tradition,
29:21there's an equally
29:22strong contradictory one
29:23about who wrote
29:24these gospels.
29:25Add all those
29:28contradictory traditions
29:30together, though,
29:31and what you soon see
29:33is Christianity
29:34spreading very quickly
29:35through the Roman Empire.
29:38Churches sprung up
29:39like mushrooms
29:39at Antioch
29:41and cities like
29:42Smyrna in Asia Minor,
29:45Alexandria in Egypt,
29:48Corinth in Greece
29:49and Great Rome itself.
29:52The gospels were made
29:54in this period
29:54and they may have
29:56been written
29:56in one country,
29:57edited in another
29:58and copied out
29:59and published somewhere else.
30:01For Christianity
30:02had become
30:02completely international.
30:06Seems to me
30:07what you can really say
30:09about the gospels
30:11and their writing
30:11goes something like this.
30:14For one thing,
30:15the first Christian preachers,
30:17Jesus,
30:17the Apostles,
30:18St Paul,
30:19didn't write much at all.
30:20They were preachers.
30:22Jesus only wrote
30:22one word that we know
30:24of the gospels tell us
30:24he wrote it on sand.
30:26St Paul only wrote
30:27his epistles
30:28when he couldn't actually
30:29turn up at the church
30:30in person.
30:31This was a faith
30:32that was being spread
30:33by the power and passion
30:34of the word itself.
30:36It wasn't then
30:38until that generation
30:41of preachers
30:41that were spreading
30:42the faith right round
30:43the Mediterranean,
30:44right through North Africa
30:45into Italy,
30:46Greece,
30:46all over the place.
30:48It wasn't until that generation
30:49had actually started to die
30:50that the church decided
30:52that it would write
30:53the stuff down
30:54because these people
30:55were preaching
30:56the sayings of Jesus,
30:58anecdotes about his life,
30:59where he was born.
31:00And there was a sort of
31:01considerable body of this
31:02that obviously built up.
31:04And then in this period
31:06when the old men
31:07had started to die,
31:08the church,
31:08as one church historian said,
31:10actually suffered
31:11a loss of nerve.
31:12That was that the power
31:14of those first words
31:14was going to be diminished.
31:15So they caught it in print
31:16and put it on the page.
31:18So what happens?
31:20You have the four gospels
31:21and I think what they represent
31:22is books written down
31:24by different churches
31:25in different places,
31:26perhaps one in Rome,
31:27one in Alexandria,
31:28one in Antioch perhaps,
31:29or Ephesus,
31:29Asia Minor somewhere,
31:31but churches that had
31:32shared this similar body
31:33of preaching knowledge,
31:34the same sort of sayings
31:35and stories of Jesus.
31:37And they were even
31:37to compare them too
31:39and use one version
31:39against the other.
31:41So you can't say then
31:42that the four gospels
31:44are actually four biographies
31:45written down by people
31:46trailing along after Jesus
31:48and copying his every word.
31:49But you can say
31:50that they are the most
31:52authentic witnesses
31:53of that amazing wash of faith
31:55that was going right
31:56through the Mediterranean.
31:57So you can say
32:27This area here is the very centre of Rome.
32:31The area, that is, between the great palaces of the Emperors on the hill,
32:36and the Senate House over there,
32:38the Roman Senate that controlled the actual Empire.
32:41This little area in the middle was packed with monuments,
32:44monuments that went back hundreds and hundreds of years.
32:47Next to the Senate House was a little round hole.
32:50That was called the Navel of the Universe.
32:52Next to that was a golden milestone,
32:54and all the Roman roads,
32:56the roads that went to the edges of Persia to Scotland,
32:58they were all measured from that particular little golden spot.
33:01And the touching thing about the middle of this Empire,
33:04and the thing that's really quite moving when you come here,
33:06is actually how small it is.
33:08Actually, after all it had started as a marketplace hundreds of years ago,
33:11it's a little place where the people of Rome,
33:13the little villagers of Rome, could come and flog their cheeses.
33:16This was the place, even at the height of Empire,
33:18where Julius Caesar actually was cremated in that area there.
33:21You know, the great speech of Mark Antony,
33:23where he roused the Roman populace.
33:25That took place here.
33:26There was a very little local event between Roman people.
33:29So if you were a foreigner then,
33:31had something to sell, or a religion to offer the world,
33:34you would have come here.
33:35That's why Peter and Paul came here.
33:37They came here to sell the Roman's Christianity.
33:40It would have been a very difficult job.
33:42These Romans were clever people.
33:44They inherited all the Greek philosophers.
33:46There were Stoics here.
33:47There were followers of Aristotle, Plato, people like that.
33:50These little Eastern guys turning up, talking about salvation,
33:53about the end of the world, about a God full of love,
33:55would have passed them by completely.
33:57In fact, it took Christianity hundreds of years
33:59to conquer the minds of those sort of people.
34:01Rome was captured by Christianity, of course,
34:11along with its entire empire.
34:15And that's a big part of the problem
34:17if you're trying to find out how the New Testament was made.
34:20Because almost all the ancient writings about it
34:24were made by the winners of a series of rows and debates
34:27about the church and its Bible.
34:34During its first two centuries,
34:36Christianity was but one of a dozen Eastern faiths in Rome.
34:40It was a muddled thing, and so were many of its preachers.
34:43And there was no Bible,
34:45no single organisation called the Church
34:49to tell the faithful what to believe.
34:54That the Christianity that we know today
34:56ever emerged at all was a close-run thing.
35:07Just how close you can still see
35:09under the oldest churches of Rome.
35:11Many of them are built directly on top of pagan shrines,
35:15like this one, built in honour of Mithras, the Persian god.
35:30The most evocative of all these Eastern shrines at Rome,
35:34where you can really get the feeling of their strange lost world,
35:38is a little-known basilica
35:40that was found just a few years ago,
35:42deep under Rome's main railway line.
35:59Many people who took up these Eastern religions,
36:01and they were very popular,
36:02thought that faith was not only based on belief,
36:05but on personal mystic experience.
36:10They formed underground sects of initiates,
36:12called knowers, Gnostics,
36:14the people who know.
36:17In their secret meeting places,
36:19Jesus, Socrates, Osiris and Alexander the Great
36:22might all be equally revered
36:24as guardians of mystic truths.
36:26The underground chapel is shaped exactly like a church.
36:33Once it was a hall of a sect so secret
36:35that it's completely disappeared.
36:38We don't even know its name anymore.
36:41God alone knows what went on here.
36:44These places had their origins in the halls
36:46where mystery rites took place,
36:49where people were initiated with drugs
36:51and terrifying physical ordeals.
36:55And yet, if Jesus of Nazareth had turned up in here,
36:58people would have greeted him as a great teacher,
37:01a fighter against evil and darkness.
37:04All these strange rituals,
37:09these lovely Gnostical ideas,
37:13might seem innocent enough in themselves.
37:15You think, well, you know,
37:16Christians would come in here and accept part of this.
37:19After all, all these ideas of lightness and dark
37:21and good and evil, they're even in the Bible.
37:23You might think this is an innocent enough place.
37:27Consider what happened to lots of Christians.
37:30Some of them, for example, Gnostic Christians,
37:32would take up eating very special diets.
37:35They'd think that food itself was divided
37:37into good and evil, into light and dark,
37:39so you'd only actually eat good food,
37:41light food, drink white wine.
37:45Cucumbers were a very fashionable food.
37:47The way, I suppose, when you cut them,
37:49slice them around the edge,
37:50they flash in the sun and they're full of light and water.
37:53So you'd eat lots of cucumbers.
37:54And your theory, of course, would be verified,
37:56because it would go through your body
37:57and the wicked sin would come out as excrement.
37:59And, of course, the light would come out in orgasm,
38:04as semen.
38:06So your Gnostic Christians, and lots of them were doing this,
38:09were having orgiastic rituals in their churches,
38:12drinking the semen, anointing statues
38:14and each other with it as part of the love of God itself.
38:18That's a fairly shocking idea to modern Christians.
38:20And, of course, St Paul himself
38:22differentiates between sacred and profane love.
38:25But it was a difference that wasn't nearly so apparent in ancient Rome.
38:29And lots of Christians went down the Gnostic path.
38:32The teachers, in these secret sects,
39:01wrote and wrote and wrote.
39:06These are little fragments of their wisdom
39:11from the desert in Egypt, from that amazing time capsule.
39:17These are middle-class people.
39:19They're thinking that truth lies in the written word.
39:23They cherish it. They have big libraries.
39:27They're starting to write Christian literature
39:30in amongst all this other strange stuff that's going on.
39:34But it's not just straight-on Christian literature like we know it.
39:38This is Christian literature
39:41seen through thousands of years of religious experience.
39:46Interpretations of Jesus.
39:49Not straightforward Christianity.
39:55And so you get a most extraordinary body of literature growing up.
40:00You get twelve Gospels.
40:01One of them tells us that Jesus was gay.
40:03You get a wondrous poem that tells us that God was actually a woman.
40:07The poem is called Thunder, Perfect Mind.
40:09And dozens and dozens of texts so strange that you can't understand what's in them.
40:13You get letters to St Paul writing to Aristotle.
40:16Jesus writing to the king of Edessa.
40:19And in amongst all this great mountain of literature,
40:22you get the ancient books which will become our modern Bible,
40:26mixed up with all this other stuff.
40:28And this lot here represents literally the earliest known fragments of the Christian Bible that we possess.
40:37These ones were found in a desert monastery.
40:47They're preserved in two libraries.
40:49One in Geneva and here, the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin,
40:52where each sheet is preserved between sheets of glass.
40:56So imagine that.
40:59This, for example, is the Gospel of Luke.
41:02You know that wonderful paragraph where it says,
41:05consider the lilies of the field, Jesus is talking,
41:08how they grow, toil not neither do they spin.
41:12Well, just there is the first time you'll ever see that.
41:17In our history, this is the first time you can read it.
41:29So, if we were doing a history of the Bible and we were saying,
41:32look, you know, here's the oldest Bible in the world, no problem,
41:34all that happens is it gets copied out from here till today.
41:37That's simple, isn't it?
41:38But look at it from the other end of the telescope.
41:40What you've got is not only this body of text
41:44that we think of as the sacred Bible text,
41:47but all this stuff too,
41:48all this stuff from the underground movements.
41:50So the big problem in the church,
41:52and not only with what we think of as the church,
41:55but all sorts of churches all over the world are equally puzzled.
41:59These ancient churches thinking,
42:00my God, there's all this literature.
42:01What of it is sacred and what of it isn't?
42:04About AD 170, a Christian who lived in Asia Minor, a man called Marcion,
42:13made the first stab at deciding what of all these ancient Christian books
42:19would actually go into a proper Bible.
42:21Trouble was, Marcion was a Gnostic.
42:24He didn't believe Jesus had been born.
42:26He thought that they actually sprung from the brain of God, fully grown.
42:31And he also thought Jews were the work of the devil,
42:33which somewhat limited his choice of books.
42:36The Gospel of Luke was chosen.
42:38It was the only Gospel which seemed to have been to be any good at all.
42:41It was cut down to about a quarter of its proper size,
42:44and a couple of Paul's letters were thrown in.
42:47So Marcion's choice of books was somehow a manifesto of his beliefs.
42:52Now, about the same time, in Italy,
42:55there was somebody else composing a list of books suitable for a Christian Bible.
42:59And that one is actually much bigger than we've got today.
43:02So there's quite a little choice going on all over the place.
43:04People are making their own choices.
43:06The one that won, the one we have today,
43:09doesn't come from the Holy Land or anywhere in the East.
43:12It comes from Lyon, in the south of France.
43:21Lyon had actually been established by the Romans.
43:25It wasn't a French city, it was a Roman city.
43:28It was part of that international world that went all around the Mediterranean.
43:31It was founded in about A.D. 50 for the Roman legionaries.
43:35And it was actually full of Greeks from Asia Minor.
43:38And there were Christian missionaries, too,
43:40who had come to the town to convert the local people and the Roman soldiers.
43:52The temples that the Greeks brought with them from Asia Minor to Lyon,
43:57they're still here.
43:59These beautiful ruins high above the modern town.
44:02Over there is the Temple of Sibylle, the great mother goddess of Asia Minor.
44:09Over there, of course, the Christian church dedicated to the Virgin Mary,
44:13the great mother goddess of the Christian faith.
44:16Now, the Christians that came here thought of themselves as rather special people.
44:25These were people from Antioch, from Smyrna, from Ephesus.
44:29Some of them were taught by people, they said, who had sat at the feet of John himself.
44:34They were very, very close to the source of Christianity.
44:37And here they were in Lyon.
44:40They kept a very tight connection with their old church, though.
44:43They learned the local language, they converted local people,
44:46but it was a very Eastern church.
44:48In the years 150, 160, 170, 180 after Christ,
45:01just about the time the Greeks were coming to Lyon,
45:05the persecutions began.
45:07It was a simple test, really.
45:09Did you want to worship the emperor or did you want to worship Jesus Christ?
45:12If you worship the emperor, you get to be a good guy and succeed in society.
45:16If you want to worship Jesus, you might well end up in an amphitheater being torn to bits.
45:22So it's sort of a terrible test of wills, really.
45:27Here in Lyon,
45:30the Greeks were amongst the first to be persecuted.
45:33There was a man called Attalus, who came from Pergamum, close to Smyrna.
45:37He was a big man, he was very popular in the town.
45:41And they led him round in a circle here with a notice on his front.
45:45I'm Attalus and I'm a Christian.
45:48And that's all Attalus would say.
45:51As they heated to red heat an iron chair and sat him in it.
45:56And then took him back to the cells and brought him back for two successive days.
46:00Until the text says his whole body looked like a wound.
46:04And then he died.
46:06Lots and lots of people were persecuted here.
46:09It's not good enough to say these were just sadomasochists.
46:13You're sitting in the front row.
46:15The persecuted people are having their blood splashed out.
46:18It could go over you.
46:19You could smell the burning flesh.
46:21What's going on here?
46:22It's a sort of terrible psychodrama between hundreds and hundreds of people willing you to do something.
46:28And the Christians, some of the Christians, the bravest of them all, not wanting to give up the faith.
46:34After lots of martyrs had died at Lyon, including the old bishop who was beaten up and died in prison.
46:41The church official, a Greek called Irenaeus, came to a really momentous decision.
46:46A decision that would not only affect the Bible, but the entire future history of the church.
46:51He wrote a book.
46:53It was the first Catholic book, the first universal book of the Christian church.
46:58A theological tome called Against the Heresies.
47:03His book was a violent attack on a part of the Christian church.
47:09It was as if Irenaeus was saying to the audience in the amphitheatre,
47:13This is Christianity. This is what our people are dying for.
47:17For the Gnostics were dying in that amphitheatre as bravely as members of his own congregation.
47:24Like St Paul before him, Irenaeus believed that true Christianity was his Christianity.
47:31He thought that the Gnostics were holy anarchists.
47:34He wanted to show the world an organised and universal church, not a secret sect.
47:40Irenaeus never tells us directly of his vision in the book.
47:45He argues, he insults, he refutes.
47:49Christianity, he says, is not like this, it's not like that.
47:54And slowly, through his arguments, you begin to see what it was like for him.
48:01And as Irenaeus had come from Asia Minor, the old stamping ground of St John and St Paul,
48:07part of his vision went back to the days of the first church, almost to Jesus and Jerusalem.
48:13How, then, did Irenaeus go about deciding what would go in our Bible?
48:25Well, the Old Testament was easy. That had been decided years before, no trouble.
48:30But the New Testament, that was still a big problem.
48:33What the man relied on, at the end of the day, was what he considered to be the most sacred thing.
48:41Remember, he'd come from Asia Minor.
48:43He'd known men in his childhood who had sat at the feet of John.
48:46He had a problem, he says once, about the book of Revelations.
48:49He could write to a man who he thought had known John himself.
48:53The traditions in that part of the church went back through the disciples, even to Jesus.
48:58It was a tradition that was a verbal tradition as well as a literary tradition.
49:02They knew what was sacred and they knew the heart of the Bible.
49:05And this was actually going quite through, right through the Mediterranean.
49:09Just at the same time the martyrs of Leon were being killed, martyrs were being killed in North Africa.
49:14And when their judges asked them what they were dying for, they said they were dying for the Gospels and the letters of a just man, one Paul.
49:23But how many Gospels were there?
49:25Well, Irenaeus had no doubt about that at all.
49:28He doesn't even begin to defend it on any logical grounds at all.
49:31He says there were four Gospels.
49:33There were four Gospels like there were four winds, like there were four corners of the universe, like the four cherubim of Ezekiel's vision.
49:40Four was the order of the universe and four was the heart of his New Testament.
49:55It seems rather silly now to ask again if these four Gospels are true or false.
50:02For in history, as in faith, real truth, insight, is never to be found in bits of information, scientific facts.
50:13But in the order, in the patterns that you choose to make with them.
50:17.
50:29.
50:32.
50:36ORGAN PLAYS
51:06ORGAN PLAYS
51:36ORGAN PLAYS
Comments