The origins Of faith

.1. Enoch Powell Religion in Ancient History, Studies in ideas, rnen and events S. G. F. Brandon (George Allen and Unwin..£6.00) This book comes out three years after the death of Professor Brandon, who had Prepared it earlier still from semi-popular articles written by him on the history of religions. About half of the book is concerned With the basic religious concepts — soul, time, death, creation, immortality, resurrection etc. — in the ancient countries of the Near and Middle East. The remainder deals directly. With aspects of the origin of Christianity, though the two parts are closely connected, since the Greek and Jewish elements in Chritianity were strongly impregnated with religious ideas traceable in Egypt, Mesopotatnia and Iran.

In his earlier more detailed works Professor Brandon had drawn attention to two factors in the formation of Christianity: the Zealot Movement in Judaea under the Romans, and ,the destruction of the Temple and city by litus in AD70, which the Zealot movement Precipitated. He suggests that the historical J,esus was a Zealot put to death by the Icomans for sedition but believed by his immediate followers to have somehow survived. At the destruction, however, the mother community of believers at Jerusalem disappeared, and the tradition and doctrine of the sect was transformed to suit a Roman and Gentile environment, utilising the hitherto rejected insights of Paul, whose work, but for the catastrophe of AD70, would have been suppressed. Hence, for example, the energetic attempts m the gospel narratives to exculpate the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, or the attribution of the recognition of the crucified Jesus as the Son of God to a Roman centurion.

This transformation, to which Christianity owed its ability to become a world religion, would have taken place primarily in the community at Rome, for which the supPosedly earliest of the surviving narratives, the gospel of St Mark, is thought to have been Written.

The emphasis which Professor Brandon lays on the significance of AD70 and of the Roman focus for the evolution of Christianity is persuasive; but all the more if that emphasis is Justified does AD70 present an all but impenetrable barrier to attempts to mount closer to the origin of Christianity with the Materials that we possess. There is no known external mention of Christ or Christianity (external, that is to say, to Christian writings themselves) which dates from before the second decade of the second century AD, It Was about AD 110-112 that the younger Pliny exchanged letters with the emperor Trajan about the judicial treatment of Christians in the province of Bithynia in Anatolia, who proved on investigation to be numerous and in some cases allegedly of over twenty years standing. Within the following few years Pliny's friend Tacitus wrote his account or tne fire of Rome in AD 64 containing the famous Passage (Annals xv. 44) to the effect that the Persons whom Nero caused to be accused and Punished in large numbers in order to divert from himself the suspicion of having fired the City were Christians. No previous evidence to that effect is known — Suetonius, who incidentally also belonged to the circle of Tacitus and the younger Pliny, was writing about the same time — and it is entirely possible that Tacitus himself conjecturally identified as Christians the victims of Nero's prosecutions and !punishments because Christianity was attracting unfavourable official notice at the time when he wrote. In any case, Tacitus's .statement that "the originator of the sect was a certain Christus, put to death under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate" implies no more than knowledge of the account given by the Christians themselves in Tacitus's own time.

' We have therefore, a Period of two generations, or seventy years, from the governorship of Pilate (AD 26-36), in which the gospels (whenever written) located the Crucifixion, to the first appearance of Christianity in history. Exactly in the middle of that period falls the destruction of the Temple, which put an end to the Messianic hopes of the Jewish people in any secular context. There would be ample time in the following forty years for a reinterpretation of that Messianic hope as having actually been fulfilled, once for all, in a manner which extended its results to the whole of the Greco-Roman world so busily then engaged in looking in all directions for salvation (soteria). An incidental observation of Professor Brandon's illustrates the potential creative power of the AD 70 event. He notes that the Jewish passover combined the sacrificial eating of a young lamb and of unleavened bread, but that "after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 the eating of the paschal lamb ceased." In the narrative of the Last Supper it is the bread and wine that represent the body and blood of the one who is to be the eternal sacrifice: the killing and eating of the paschal lamb, discontinued on one -plane, has been reinstituted on a different one.

Where Professor Brandon's thesis becomes less convincing is in its bold reconstruction of the eclipse and revival of the Pauline interpretation of pre-AD 70 Christianity. Before this part of the thesis could be seriously considered, it would be necessary to have arrived at a conclusion on the age-old but unsolved problems of the nature of the so-called corpus of Pauline letters and of that most extraordinary document, f—e Acts of the Apostles, as well as the relationship between the two. That the Acts are not to be taken at face value is well enough accepted: the typologists have shown that the shape of the composition is not that of straightforward narrative or history. This, however, does not take us very far towards understanding the baffling episode of Paul's journey to Rome, which yet was evidently central to the author's intention.

A prisoner whom the magistrates are prepared to dismiss anyhow without a stain on his character insists upon "appealing unto Caesar." Against what he appeals, is not clear, nor why the imperial administration should have gone to the trouble of shipping to Rome prisoners who frivolously preferred appeal to discharge. Then, when Rome is at last reached, the narrative collapses: the appeal, which was to have been the object of the whole exercise and of which the outcome should have been the climax of the narrative, disappears without trace, leaving Paul an undisturbed resident evangelist in the midst of a pre-existing Christian community. It looks as though the main thing was to get Paul to Rome, no matter how. But why?

The attempt to understand Christian origins is like a confluence of waters: the religions of the Greco-Roman world are one tributary stream; the historical setting of the first and

h relations. Black clergy, for exam' ple, were paid lath lower stipends than white priests; and e Superior of the Pretoria Native Mission wias still insistent, in the 'forties, that his black ; er,gY went round to the back door of his trehsIdence — a disagreeable prejudice which e Reverend Michael Scott found so ape PBalling that he refused to stay in the place. y , ruil! in general the Church sought to apply the Ilngs of Lambeth Conferences since 1908 e a,gainst racial discrimination. Geoffrey Clayion arrived as Bishop of Johannesburg in 1934, („and in 1948 he was elected Archbishop of fLaPetown. He was an Englishman. He came r.titrl the upper middle-class: witness an in/ ,Ident when he was taken out by a maid when lue was a small child — on inquiring who the radY was who stopped to greet him, the maid ePlied, "That, Master Geoffrey, is your Mother." Of such was the England of his iildhood. After a conventional education at ligbY and Cambridge, he became for ten Years, Dean of Peterhouse. He was then, successively, vicar of Little St Marys, Cambridge, , hand of Chesterfield. Arriving without prior L'nowledge of Africa in Johannesburg in 1934, recognized at once the leading problems of society of mixed races. He was never paracularly concerned with politics as such. He Was a man of austere habit, of wisdom and t11,11usual sanctity — he knew too much about tee ambiguities of human nature and the nacity or ingenuity of sin to throw blame I a,ad praise about the place, as some of his 1 ergy did in South Africa.

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His chief weakness was his petulance, his inability to suffer quietly while the a„rrangements he had so carefully made were 4Pset by the inefficiency of others: faults not ,11111t,nown in Deans of Peterhouse. In South '',Ifirlca he began with a cautious appraisal of e racial situation, and in his first Charge, in he was apparently prepared to envisage , separate development" of the races. Time as soon to show him that although there "a something to be said for such a policy it cAould not realistically be said in Southern ,jrica. For the issue was not a pure one. ;.'eParate development' was to be put into efleot by men whose ulterior convictions about , 'Ile inherent racial inferiority of the Negro nrace, and whose disregard of the sensitivities "PPonents, was such that whatever the ab ' stract merits of the policy it could not, in , Practice, reveal itself in laws and public attitr,n,des which the Church might favour. Nrnilarly, Clayton's early hope for some sort n04 ecumenical union between the Dutch .'formed Church and the Church of England the Province, was allowed to dissolve. Mr katon, the author of Cry the Beloved Country, ",,as written a fascinating account of how chbishop Clayton came to adjust himself to ' 'le facts of life in South African society. tkBtit it also becomes clear, from this account, tu. at Clayton never lost his sound and Chris„Ian balance of judgement; his continuing nse of the corrupting consequences or tne sin admixed with the motives of men of all Parties and all races. Indeed, the most revealing Parts of the book concern Clayton's unhappy relations with the zealots — with churchmen hose linear vision and capacity for excited 119ral fervour were consecrated in England :i.th garlands of approval which time has not W 1th e red. Here we see them in a South African context, through the eyes of a saddened and vise akhbishop striving to combat racism yet Preserve a pastoral love of racists. Here is IVetichael Scott, 'attached' in England to a 'prilmunist cell before his stormy ministry in Uth Africa, which ended in his deportation. see him ignoring episcopal advice; leaving fis Parish to attend political demonstrations 1.ri distant parts of the country; getting goaled; inyolved with Communist groups; finally dis;I.:lased by Clayton. Here, too, is Gonville ,rench-Beytagh, "the most muddle-headed "D'ildent that he ever encountered,” as the rincipal of his theological seminary described him. Clayton actually liked him — and the esteem was sufficienty mutual for Mr Beytagh to terminate his plans for getting married when Clayton urged him to remain single. Their friendship was, however, full of bickering. Beytagh was eventually to desert his flock, too, like Scott. And so did Ambrose Reeves. He was Clayton's successor as Bishop of Johannesburg. Relations between the two men were frigid; Clayton especially disapproved of Reeves's belief that the Church should oppose apartheid by joining with political organisations opposed to the government. Clayton was no more sympathetic to Father Trevor Huddleston. He regarded the monk as a fanatic, and in 1955 refused to remain as Visitor of the Community of the Resurrection while Huddleston was Provincial. At that time Huddleston was up to his cowl in hot water over his opposition to the 'slum clearance' — or forced segregation, according to viewpoint — of Sophiatown, where his mission was. Clayton was particularly incensed by an Observer article Huddleston wrote entitled 'The Church Sleeps On'. Since the Church was the one presided over by Clayton, and since he was doing all he could, within charity and within the law, to oppose racial discrimination, he not unnaturally took a dim view of Huddleston's piece.

For a long time the Church of England has accepted the views of the zealots with an uncritical eagerness. Our estimate of South Africa has acquired a lot of its passion from acceptance of their judgements. It is the most useful feature of this life of Clayton to offer another view, the view of a man whose agonized governance of the Church ought to give his opinions an authority which theirs lack. While on holiday in 1955 with Selby Taylor, Bishop of Pretoria, Clayton reflected on "his attitude to churchmen like Reeves, Huddleston, and Scott". In the words of his biographer:

He detested what he took to be exhibitionism. He believed that their judgement was unbalanced, and that they could not see the other side of the question. He himself had a pastoral responsibility for white as well as black, and he believed that Huddleston in particular overlooked this first responsibility. He admitted that he had great difficulty in being patient with Reeves in episcopal synods .. He felt also that Reeves, Huddleston and Scott grew too emotional over South Africa....

But Clayton was not reduced to silence as a consequence of being sickened by his colleagues. He disapproved of boycott of South Africa or its produce, but he did support the 'Black Sash' movement; and his public writings in the 'fifties time and time again condemned the principles which inspired the legislative enactment of apartheid — especially the Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the Native Laws Amendment Bill of 1957. He also sought to implement the traditional teaching of the Church of England on political involvement: that the Church had an obligation to define and to declare general principles within which laws could be evaluated, but that the Church corporately had neither the expertise nor the right to endorse detailed applications or support political parties who did.

Finally, in 1957, Clayton reached the moment of test. Proposed legislation in that year gave the State formal powers to exclude Africans from attending churches in areas designated for European residence. Clayton recognized at once that this interference with the principle of religious freedom could not be allowed, and, for the first time, and contrary to all his instincts, he summoned the bishops of the Province and drew up a condemnation of the proposed law. "We are commanded to render under Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's," he wrote to the Prime Minister. If the Bill became law "we should ourselves be' unable to obey it or to counsel our clergy and

people to do so." A classical conflict Of Church and State was thus, in the ehrl' unavoidable. Clayton died of a heart attack the same night that he signed the letter. have done my best to make clear to felloW Anglicans in England and elsewhere how) complex the situation in this country is, he had once written, "and to discourage pronouncements on points of detail and condemnation of particular persons." Alas, that, part of his service died with him, and the ' Church has been the loser. This sad tragedY. and the uneven life of this unusual and 11°1Y man are admirably related in Mr Paton biography. Churchmen will do well to read it' and be chastened. Apartheid is too terrible ta be the easy spring of vicarious emotional indulgence.

Edward Norman is the present Dean of Pe' terhouse, Cambridge.