Discover more from The Pull Request
Christ and his endless resurrections (free preview)
Tom Holland on the Christianity of the modern world, how even secular progressives are zealously enacting the gospels, and what comes next
Tom Holland (FRSL) is a wide-ranging and erudite author of many tomes on both ancient and medieval history, as well as a writer and presenter of numerous BBC shows. His book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is a masterful review of both Christian history, and how Christianity created the (seemingly) secular post-Enlightenment world we inhabit. He’s also probably the most well-spoken person I’ve ever interviewed: the transcription required almost no editing.
This is a free preview of roughly the first third of the interview with Tom Holland. To read the full interview, please subscribe below.
These interviews, plus other Pull Request content, take a whopping amount of time to pull off. It would be impossible for me to do it without your support.
An argument started among the disciples as to which of them would be the greatest. Jesus, knowing their thoughts, took a little child and had him stand beside him. Then he said to them, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the One who sent me. For it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest.”
-Luke 9:46-48
Thanks Tom, it's good to finally meet you face to face. You're one of my intellectual heroes, I'm just going to fanboy there for a second and say that.
Oh, I feel overwhelmed by that.
You wrote an amazing book called Dominion and that has been this huge spark for me getting obsessed about the Christian message. Rather than rephrase what you've said so well, maybe Tom, you can just summarize for us.
Well, the argument is essentially that in the West, we are goldfish swimming in waters that are essentially Christian. That was the metaphor that I ran with as I was writing Dominion. But then, I finished and it went off to be published. I then watched the HBO series on Chernobyl, which I don't know if you watched, I'm sure lots of people listening will have seen it. It describes the rupturing of the Soviet reactor in Ukraine. There's this incredible scene where you actually see the rupture and you see the air ionizing as the radioactivity is leaking, and it's obvious what’s happening.
But of course, the impact of the radioactive leak is that it drifts northwards across the woods and it hits Kiev and then it drifts northwards towards Scandinavia and it drifts across Northern Europe and people are breathing in this radioactivity. They don't know that it's changing them, they don't do that it's affecting them, but it is.
The argument in Dominion is that we recognize Christianity when we see it upfront in the form of churches and cathedrals and priests and crucifixes, but perhaps we don't recognize it in other ways. So, I'm not saying that Christianity makes your hair fall out and kills you, but that it can transform you and you may not even realize that it's having that effect on you as you breathe it in. And I think that that's particularly true of the form of Christianization that the West has been going through basically since the '60s, which is one that no longer recognizes itself as being Christian and indeed, in many cases, casts itself as being profoundly antithetical to Christianity.
But it does so, I would argue for very, very Christian reasons. You can really only recognize that when you pull the camera right out and you look at the way in which Christianity, back at its early centuries, is like this cuckoo in the nest of Roman civilization, in the nest of the Roman Empire, because it's only then that you properly recognize how weird it was in the context of antiquity and, therefore, how completely we are it’s heirs even though we may not recognize it.
I was reading Gibbon recently in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, specifically the chapters that covered Christianity. For one, I’d forgotten how anti-Semitic Gibbon was, but then it's funny because he becomes anti-Christian as well as the story goes on. But he recounts again a lot of the reactions of the Roman world at the time to Christianity and how this martyrology cult seems so bizarre to them in so many ways. It wasn't just the monotheism of it, the rejection of paganism, but the thing that stands out to the Romans about Christianity, and you highlight this in your book, is the notion of making a tortured criminal, literally the lowest of the low by conventional standards, a figure of divinity.
Speaking of fish out of water, here's the out-of-water moment: you're sitting in a church, particularly in a Catholic church in Southern Europe, say, you're staring at this figure of a man who has been brutalized and is just gushing blood, and somehow that is the divinity figure. In the Greco-Roman period of the time, that would have been completely insane.
The monotheism isn't strange to educated Greeks and Romans. There's a strain towards monotheism within Greek philosophy and indeed within cultic practices. The idea that Zeus comes to be identified with the primordial God, there's a pantheistic quality in it. So, that's not particularly odd, nor of course is the idea that human being can become a God or in some way divine because in the lifetime of Jesus, the fastest growing cult probably of all time at that point is the cult of Caesar Augustus, who is the son of a God. He’s the adopted son of Julius Caesar, who's been deified. He takes that on not just as a title but as his name, Divi Filius, son of a God. He brings peace to a troubled world; he ascends to heaven; he sits at the right hand of his father; he is celebrated as a God by worshipers across the Mediterranean world. None of that's weird at all.
What is odd is to hear that someone who has suffered, not just execution but the death of a slave: crucifixion is regarded as the most repellent, the most revolting way to die. Therefore, it is peculiarly fitted to the torturing to death of uppity slaves. The idea that someone who suffered that fate could in any way be divine, let alone the massive heft of divinity that the Jewish tradition accords to the idea of divinity is just….well, Paul says it, he says that it's a stumbling block to the Jews, which of course it is for obvious reasons, but that it's lunacy for the Gentiles. That sense of the taboo quality of having a crucified God is there throughout the early centuries of Christianity, it's very, very manifested in Paul's letters.
Paul is constantly going, "Whoa, this is weird. It's so odd. I mean, I believe it but it's just mad." Through the second and third centuries, and even when Constantine converts, it's really striking that for the Christianized Roman Empire, you don't have images of Jesus on the cross. The first ones that you start to get—there's one in the British Museum—is an ivory that dates from the early fifth century AD. Jesus is portrayed on the cross but there's no hint of agony, there's no hint of torture. He's incredibly buff, he's incredibly ripped; he looks like an Olympic athlete. He is someone who has won the great race of life…and that's how he's portrayed.
It's a thousand years after his birth in Western Europe, long after the Roman Empire in the West has fallen, that you get the first image of him actually dead on the cross. And I think that in a sense, over the course of medieval history in the West, that's a tradition that then passes into the Catholic strain in the early Modern period, we've become desensitized to just how odd this is. The ambition of Dominion absolutely was to try and open people's eyes to how strange it was, to give them some sense of how odd it would have been to a Roman or a Greek.
I think that the emotional impact of George Floyd's death is only conceivable in the Christian civilization because otherwise why would you care? I mean, it sounds a kind of crazy thing to ask, but most civilizations couldn't care less. People are brutalized and tortured to death all the time in Roman society. Nobody gives a toss about it. It's only because Christianity has as its central emblem, someone being brutalized to death by the apparatus of a great power, that we are given picking up the emotional resonances of that. And I think it's precisely because there's a kind of Christ-shaped hole in the West that George Floyd's death kind of just fit into the gap very, very conveniently.
The way I've tried to expound your argument to other people is via the two comparisons that the Western mind has easy access to: one is the Greco-Roman world, since some people have some flavor of classical education. The other, which is very personal to me, is the Judaic perspective. As full disclosure, though I think everyone who follows me knows, there's this Jewish conversion process going on for a bunch of reasons that probably aren’t worth going into.
As I read more and more about Judaism, I think of the old saw about how "Christianity is Judaism for the masses." Or as I like to put it in my Silicon Valley way: "Christianity is Judaism with product-market fit and a growth team." In other words, if you took the Facebook Growth Team and gave them the Judaism product, what they’d come up with is Christianity. And what I mean by that is that a lot of what's in Christianity already exists in Judaism in various forms.
The notion of a messiah, of millenarianism (i.e. belief in some coming kingdom of God), they all exist in Judaism. Read the Book of Isaiah, and it sounds very Christian actually. But the two things that I think you don't find in Judaism, or if you find them they're in such reduced form they’re a different thing, is what you just described, which is the moral inversion of the gospels: "The last shall be first and the first shall be last."
The other is universalism, which exists inside Judaism but always in tension with particularism; it's even now a debate within Judaism. So there's two things really, again, the victim-as-hero narrative and then universalism, the two things that, at least from the Judaic perspective, stand out as different and unique.
To cite one (counter) example, one of the great sages of Judaism, Rabbi Akiva, was tortured to death by the Romans just as Christ was. But he's never depicted or discussed in that way. It’s an historical fact that he died flayed alive with iron combs, but it’s not something fixated on. If this were a Catholic saint he would be depicted, as most Catholic saints are, with the iconography of their deaths. He would be portrayed with iron combs in his hands, just as Saint Sebastian is pictured with the arrows or Saint Lawrence with the gridiron he was roasted on. There's just this difference in the reverence of martyrdom between Christianity and Judaism.
In the discussion of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, which is how it's framed today, we think that there are entities called Christianity and that there are entities called Judaism. There's a huge problem, which is that the idea of there being something called Judaism is a fundamentally Christian notion. And one of the reasons I wanted to write Dominion was that, before I wrote Dominion, I was writing mainly about classical history. And I would find that again and again that because I was using English, a language that is absolutely saturated in Christian assumptions, it was really, really difficult to find words that did not bring about an anachronism.
So, Judaism is an example. There was a word in Greek in so the first century AD, Ioudaïsmos that is used. But it doesn't mean what we call Judaism. It's more like Jewishness, it's the totality of being Jewish. In the second century, the Christian writers start to use a word, Xristianismos. And inevitably, they want to explain what they mean by this by counterpointing it to something else. And so, they start to use Ioudaïsmos in that sense. That Ioudaïsmos comes to be defined as something that is like Christianity but is different to it. And that's the sense in which it's used by Christians ever since.
Jews do not use this word until the 19th century and what prompts their starting to use it is the French Revolution, by which Jews who previously had defined themselves as belonging to people—they're the nation of Israel—are invited to become French. But to become French citizens, they have to stop considering themselves as belonging to the nation of Israel and see themselves as belonging to the French nation. And the fact that they're Jewish is regarded by the French authorities as being no more germane than the fact that they might be Catholic or Protestant or whatever.
And this is something that gets absolutely baked into 19th century European attitudes. And the result is that Jews, they can become citizens of European nation states but to do so, they have to start seeing themselves as belonging not to a people but to something called a religion, which again, a very Christian concept. And so both, it's not just Reform Judaism, which emerges in the 19th century but also Orthodox Judaism, but both of them are profoundly shaped by Christian assumptions.
The problem is that if you're going back to the time of Jesus and you're bringing these 19th century categorizations, you risk anachronism. So, if instead you think of it in the ancient sense of Ioudaïsmos as being essentially a kind of bandwidth, in which there are many, many different ... like Americanness. There are Democrats and Republicans, they're both Americans. They're all Americans. Likewise, in Jewishness the attitude of Jews to the God that they worship, there are different emphases you can use. You can emphasize God in that He's the god of Israel; the Jews are His chosen people; He particularly cares for them. Or you can emphasize the God who created man and woman in his image and has created every living thing in the cosmos. Which do you choose to emphasize?
And essentially, what comes to be Christianity and what comes to be rabbinical Judaism are both rival endpoints on that bandwidth, and to completely mess up my metaphor, let's say that it's a great river and they start to fork, but for a long time those waters are still blurring and merging, much later actually than people think. I think this is a process that is still going on in late antiquity, and it's really only by the early Middle Ages that what we would now call Christianity and what we would now call rabbinical Judaism are decisively separate.
I think that the idea that there was something called Judaism and that Christianity emerges from it is flattering to both Jews and Christians, because for Jews it means that Judaism came first, and for Christians it means that Christianity has evolved and is better, but actually it's not true, and both the church fathers and the rabbis recognize that actually what we would now call Judaism and Christianity, it's not mother and daughter, it's twins in the womb. It's Jacob and Esau, or indeed Romulus and Remus. These are all myths that both church fathers and the rabbis are drawing on. That's really what it is, and I think that complicates it, because it suggests that there's an awful lot that is Jewish about Christianity, and there's an awful lot about the road not taken, about rabbinical Judaism. But both of them are absolutely drawing on that heritage of Hebrew scripture.
Yeah. Maybe the relationship there is almost like that in the phylogenetic tree between different species which branched from a common ancestor and then evolved quite separately (rather than emerging as a direct father-son relationship). You're also right to stress also that it’s rabbinical Judaism we see today, because Christianity emerged during temple Judaism, and the later rabbinical Judaism took quite a very different turn after the official split.
It’s crucial to remember that in a sense both of them are attempts to answer a question that is posed by the destruction of the temple by the Romans, and even though that happened several decades after the death of Christ, it's a profoundly difficult question to answer for anyone who identifies him or herself as Jewish. It obviously has a seismic impact on the course that rabbinical Judaism will take, because Jews will start to focus on the law, and what will become the Talmud in due course, rather than in the rituals of the temples. But it also has a decisive impact on Christianity I think, because in a sense the idea that God manifests himself through humiliation and suffering and destruction at the hands of a great imperial power, it reinforces the message that Paul has already begun to preach.
For those who aren't familiar with the early history of Christianity, much of what we're discussing were the burning issues of the day. Whether new Christians have to follow halakha and all the Jewish law or not. What I flippantly referred to earlier as Christian product-market fit is Paul basically saying, "no they don't have to," because it would be a very hard sell in addition to the Christian message.
But that's not why he's saying it. It's not like he's a snake oil salesman who thinks, "I've got this message and it'll be easier if I package it in this way." He's not doing it for those reasons. That may actually ... that may be an incidental perk of it and explain why Christianity is so successful, but Paul's not doing it for that reason. Paul has had the most shattering experience of his life. I think there's no question when you read his letters that he thinks that he has seen the risen Christ, the crucified Christ, and everything that he writes is an attempt to explain and justify what he has seen, and everything follows from that.
As a related reference, the other thing that I was reminded of when rereading Gibbon is that there were the Nazarenes, a Christian sect of Judaism that actually disagreed with Paul and maintained Jewish ritual. Almost like the modern-day Messianic Jews.
Well, yeah, but I think also that in the long run, the very, very long run, it feeds into Islam, because Islam is a faith that fuses the Jewish and the Christian traditions, that by the seventh century have become completely separate. So, there's this no man's land, and Islam in a way occupies that no man's land between the Jewish and the Christian traditions, and it's interesting that of all the figures in the Christian bible, the most prominent person not to figure in the Qur'an is Paul.
I hadn't quite realized that that was a lacuna there.
Yeah, it's a massive lacuna, and it's a really interesting lacuna, and Paul is the dog that doesn't bark in the night, in terms of Jewish and Christian influences on the Qur'an.
You mentioned rabbinical Judaism. As a super brief summary for readers: the current version of Judaism that you see, which is practiced in synagogues with a rabbi, along with a reverence for a text and lots of legalism around observance, that came after temple Judaism. That was in some sense a cope, to use modern language, to the temple being destroyed and the priestly observance involving sacrifices and pilgrimages to Jerusalem and whatnot all ending with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Back in the day, the modern notion of a separate Jewish religion, unattached to a people and a state, was a meaningless concept. There was no notion of a separate Judaism that existed as one of a smorgasbord of religions: there was simply the Jewish people, with a state, religion, priestly caste, and land all their own.
To go back to Christianity, Christ’s crucifixion happened when He and the disciples were going to Jerusalem for the Passover sacrifice; the menu for the Last Supper was likely the paschal lamb that Jewish law requires sacrificing the first night. This year Passover and Good Friday happened to line up again, as they occasionally do, reminding you of the fact that they’re referring to the same 72 hour window in time 2,000 years ago.
When temple observance ended and Jerusalem was destroyed, the Jews fled and created this notion of rabbinical Judaism, a form of stateless, abstract Judaism. They started annotating all the oral tradition of the temple, which became the Talmud, and a lot of what we know now as the heavily textual, heavily legalist religion is really a reaction to having lost the piece of land and the temple. This is known as rabbinic Judaism, which is unlike the Judaism of the thousand plus years prior. Just as a not-so-brief aside, because I think many readers might not understand the important distinction you’re making.
Speaking of Judaism versus Christianity: As someone raised Catholic and now switching to the other team, so to speak, I was going to start this interview with a quote from Benjamin Disraeli, which as you know was the first Jewish-born British PM. His father converted him to Anglicanism when he was 12, and due to that, he’d often be asked "are you really Jewish or Christian or what?"
His reply, which I’ll paraphrase, was “I'm the blank page found in the Bible between the Old Testament and the New Testament."
He considered himself a stuck between two worlds, and I think a lot of Western society is almost fluctuating between the two poles of the wrathful Old Testament god and the hippy-dippy, kumbaya God that you find in the Sermon on the Mount, because those are very different gods.
There's been a trend within Christianity almost from the beginning to reject the wrathful god of the Old Testament. And the first guy who does this is a shipowner from the Black Sea who comes to Rome in the second century, called Marcion, and Marcion is the first person to construct a canon of text, so what we would now think of as the Bible. And basically he gets rid of the whole of what the Christians come to call the Old Testament, or the Jews the Tanakh, and he just has Luke's gospel, some of Paul's letters, and that's basically it. That’s a massive, massive question for the church: what will become the Catholic Church? Do we get rid of the inheritance of the Hebrew scriptures? They decide not to, but I think that ever since there has been a Marcionite strain within Christianity, and I think that actually it's very, very strong at the moment, because there is actually a rejection. Whatever you want to call it; woke, progressive, the emphasis is entirely on the victim, rather than the divine father, and I think that that's something that's affecting even the churches themselves. A lot of priests are much more comfortable talking about the New Testament than they are the Old.