Not in God's Name (11 page)

It is hard to read Paul without being distracted by the immense burden of history, of all that has happened to Christianity and Judaism and their followers in the intervening centuries. He lived a tempestuous life in tempestuous times. During his lifetime, there was no such thing as ‘Christianity’ as we now understand it. The decisive break with Judaism had not yet taken place. There was an intense argument within the Church itself as to what the new faith required, and even if it was a new faith at all. The Gospels had not yet been written. There was as yet no ‘New Testament’. Doctrine had not yet been formulated. The Jewish world was in ferment, chafing under sometimes harsh and arbitrary Roman rule. Jewry was itself divided into Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. We know from rabbinic sources that there was intense internecine rivalry. Trying to reconstruct those times, we see as through a glass darkly.

One detail only of the Pauline letters will concern us in this chapter, namely sibling rivalry itself, for it was Paul who introduced the theme into Christianity. Here is how he puts the argument in Galatians, a document most historians agree to be among the earlier of his writings in the New Testament:

Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? For it is written that Abraham had two sons,
one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise.

These things may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: this is Hagar. Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother…

Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. At that time the son born in the ordinary way persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does the Scripture say? ‘Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.’ Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman. (Gal. 4:21–31)

Recall the story to which Paul is referring. God had promised Abraham and Sarah a child. Yet the years pass, and there is no child. We sense Abraham’s torment in his first recorded words to God: ‘Lord God, what will you give me, since I continue to be childless?’ (Gen. 15:2). Eventually Sarah proposed that Abraham should have a child by her servant Hagar. She would become, as it were, a surrogate mother. Hagar conceives and has a child named Ishmael. Eventually Sarah does indeed have a son, Isaac, and she then insists that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. It is a difficult story, and we will examine it in greater depth in a later chapter.

What Paul is doing in his letter to the Galatians is to reverse Jewish self-understanding. Jews are, we say in our prayers several times daily, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is constitutive of Jewish memory, history and identity. Paul argues otherwise. For him, Sarah represents Christianity while Hagar is Judaism. Christians are free, Jews are slaves. Christians are Isaac, Jews are Ishmael. Christians belong, while Jews are to be driven away.

It may be hard for a Christian to understand how a Jew feels when he or she reads these texts. It feels like being disinherited, violated, robbed of an identity. This is my past, my ancestry, my story, and here is Paul saying it is not mine at all, it is his and all who travel with him.

Context matters if we are to understand Paul. He was addressing a community that had come under the influence of those who believed that Christians entering the Abrahamic covenant had to keep the Mosaic law with all its strenuous demands. This, for Paul, was completely to misunderstand what Christianity was. The new dispensation bound people to God through faith, not law. Paul had somehow to convince his listeners that they, not the people who kept the law of Moses, were the true children of Abraham. That is what he is doing in this speech. Paul is talking not to Jews but to Christian Judaisers. It was one of the main struggles of his life and he had not yet won. He was fighting, as he saw it, for the soul of the Church.

Paul continued the argument in his letter to the Romans. By now, though, older and more reflective, he testified to his fondness for the Jewish people into which he had been born and whose refusal to accept the new dispensation caused him such distress. But he insisted nonetheless that it is the followers of Jesus, not those of Moses, who are the true children of Abraham:

[N]ot all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, ‘It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.’ In other words, it is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring. For this was how the promise was stated: At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son.’ (NIV, Rom. 9:6–9)

Again Paul’s point is simple. Abraham was biologically the father of both Isaac and Ishmael. But it was Isaac, not Ishmael, who
continued the covenant. It follows, argues Paul, that biological descent from Abraham is not enough to make you a child of the promise. For that, you need something else: in Paul’s view, faith in Jesus. Those who have it are the true children of Abraham, and those who do not, are not. He continues:

Not only that, but Rebekah’s children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad – in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls – she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ Just as it is written: ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’ (NIV, Rom. 9:10–13)

Now the claim becomes stronger still. Esau and Jacob had the same parents. They were twins. Yet Jacob was heir to the covenant, while Esau was not. Indeed, as Paul reads the text, this fact was announced by God before they were born. It follows that it was nothing that Jacob or Esau did that determined their fate. They had done nothing as yet, not even emerged into the world. God causes to inherit or disinherit whom he chooses. Merely claiming Jewish parenthood, says Paul, is not enough. It is not even relevant. Those who follow Jesus are Jacob. Those who do not, even if they are Jews, are like Esau. What is more, says Paul, quoting Malachi (1:3), God
hates
Esau. Paul is suggesting that the Jews who remain true to their faith have been not just rejected, but
hated
, by God himself.
¹²

The argument was taken further still by the Church Fathers. In the third century Cyprian developed a new contrast between Jacob’s two wives, Leah and Rachel: ‘Also Jacob received two wives: the elder Leah, with weak eyes, a type of the Synagogue; the younger, the beautiful Rachel, the type of the Church…’
¹³

Rosemary Ruether notes the persisting afterlife of this contrast:

This image of the ‘weak-eyed Leah’ could be mingled with the Pauline image of the ‘veil’ that lies over the eyes of the Jews,
blinding them to the truth, to provide an image of the ‘blindness’ of the Synagogue. Medieval cathedrals were commonly to use this image of two wives, the Church and the Synagogue, one beautiful and triumphant, the other dejected, with a blind over her eyes.
¹⁴

Maximinus, Tertullian, John Chrysostom and Aphrahat made the final, devastating move: that the Jews are Cain who, having murdered their brother, are now condemned to permanent exile. As the fourth-century writer Prudentius put it: ‘From place to place the homeless Jew wanders in ever-shifting exile…This noble race [is]…scattered and enslaved…It is in captivity under the younger faith.’
¹⁵
It was an analogy much taken up by Augustine, and it served eventually to justify the expulsions of Jews from one country after another in the Middle Ages, beginning in England in 1290 and culminating in Spain in 1492.

The historic irony is that two centuries later Islam did for Christianity something not dissimilar to what Paul had done for Judaism. It said that Abraham, Moses and Jesus were all prophets preparing the way for the final revelation whose expression was Islam itself. The Abrahamic succession passed through Ishmael, not Isaac. The Hebrew Bible says otherwise only because Jews had falsified it. Christians had misrepresented Jesus. He was merely a prophet like others, not the Son of God. Jews and Christians should therefore, in principle, convert, but if they did not do so, they were to be spared as ‘people of the Book’, and allowed to live as
dhimmi
, citizens with less than full civil rights under Islamic rule and protection.

It is now clear why Judaism, Christianity and Islam have been locked in a violent, sometimes fatal embrace for so long. Their relationship is sibling rivalry, fraught with mimetic desire: the desire for the same thing, Abraham’s promise.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are not just three different religions or civilisations. Had this been so, the devotees of each might still consider themselves a chosen people. More generously, each might have come to Niels Bohr’s conclusion that the opposite of a trivial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. There is more than one way of being-in-the-world under the sovereignty of God. More probably they would simply have ignored one another. Their differences would not have led to centuries of bloodshed and animosity.

When civilisations are merely different, each stands on its own ground. They are incommensurable. Pauline Christianity, however, claims that it is heir to the Abrahamic covenant. Islam is built on the incorporation of Judaism and Christianity into its own scheme of salvation. Despite their structural differences and internal complexities, all three Abrahamic faiths seek to build their home on the same territory of the mind – one reason why they have so often competed for the same territory on earth: the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem. They are competing brothers. Each must therefore see the other as a profound existential threat.

At the heart of all three faiths is the idea that within humanity there is one privileged position – favoured son, chosen people, guardian of the truth, gatekeeper of salvation – for which more than one candidate competes. The result is conflict of the most existential kind, for what is at stake is the most precious gift of all: God’s paternal love. One group’s victory means another’s defeat, and since this is a humiliation, a dethronement, it leads to revenge. So the strife is perpetuated. Its most famous biblical expression is the oracle granted to Rebekah while suffering pain in her pregnancy. She went ‘to seek the Lord’, and was told:

Two nations are in your womb,

And two peoples will separate from within you;

One people will be mightier than the other,

And the elder will serve the younger. (Gen. 25:23)

The message seems clear. Her children are not merely struggling in the womb. They are destined to do so for all time (I say ‘seems’ because my argument will depend on showing that this translation is fatefully misconstrued; I explain this in
chapter 7
). Their relationship is agonistic, conflictual. One can only prevail by subjugating the other. ‘The elder will serve the younger.’

Such has been the history of the relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The younger believes it has prevailed over the elder. Christianity did so to Judaism. Islam did so to both. Between them is not simply a conflict between different systems of thought and ways of life. It is, rather, an intense sibling rivalry. Each regards itself as
the
heir to the covenant with Abraham. Strife is written into the script. It may lie dormant for centuries, but its seeds lie intact, ready to spring to life once circumstances favour religious revival. Each defines and defends itself by negating the others.

This is the final piece of the puzzle. It explains why the three Abrahamic faiths have, from time to time, felt so threatened by one another. Recall the words Freud used to describe sibling rivalry: ‘impotent rage…elemental, unfathomably deep hostility…death wish…murderous intent…jealous hatred’. This is the language of violence. Remember, too, his judgement that ‘We rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development.’ Freud knew this from his own experience, and it haunted him for a lifetime.

We can now sum up the argument. Violence exists because we are social animals. We live and find our identity in groups. And groups conflict. They fight over the same resources: food, territory, other scarce goods. That is our nature and it leads to all that is best and worst about us: our altruism towards other members of our group, and our suspicion and aggression towards members
of other groups. Religion plays a part in this only because it is the most powerful source of group identity the world has yet known.

Every attempt to find a substitute for religion has resulted in even more violence. Nationalism led to two world wars. Political ideology led to Lenin and Stalin. Race led to Hitler and the Holocaust. The result was the bloodiest century in human history. The idea that we can abolish identity altogether by privileging the individual over the group is the West’s current fantasy and it has led to the return of religion in its most belligerent form. So, four centuries have led us in a complete circle back to where we were in the last great era of religious war.

Group identity need not lead to violence, but there is a mutant form, pathological dualism, that divides the world into two – our side, the children of light, and the other side, the children of darkness. If there is evil in the world, it is because of Them, not Us. This mode of thinking leads to some of the worst crimes in history because it causes people to demonise their opponents, see themselves as victims and convince themselves that evil committed in a good or sacred cause is justifiable, even noble. If there are internal resistances to such murderous and suicidal simplifications, they can be overcome by the invention of the scapegoat. Paranoia will do the rest. This is the politics of hate, and large parts of the world in the twenty-first century are awash with it.