A Geologist tries History (or "Agora" and Hypatia Yet Again)

Two years after its release, Amenábar's movie Agora is continuing to perpetuate some modern myths about the history of science.  The latest person to swallow its fable-version of history is a geologist called Donald Prothero, who is one of a number of bloggers at Skepticblog and who has written a glowing review of the film entitled "Hypatia, Agora and Religion vs Science".  Prothero is Professor of Geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and, judging from his posts, someone who has been keeping up the fight against the irrational idiots of the "Creation Science" movement and its latest stalking horse, the "Intelligent Design" political lobby.  For that he deserves both our thanks and our pity.  Unfortunately, probably as a consequence, he has bought the "Conflict Thesis" idea wholesale and so is happy to find it being reinforced by the version of history found in Agora.  Of course, it's probably not entirely fair to expect a geologist to have much of a grasp of Late Roman history or to be up on the early history of science.  But he seems to be taken as an authority on these matters by the readers of Skepticblog, judging from the readers' comments.  Which is a worry, because, despite referring to "scholarly sources" that he consulted when writing his review, he makes a complete hash of the history behind this story.

He doesn't exactly get off to a flying start by opening with a quote from Hypatia.  Or I should say a "quote" allegedly from Hypatia which is actually a modern fake:

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Now, these are fine sentiments, especially the "fables should be taught as fables" part, which is advice Amenábar could perhaps have taken before he made this film.  But the "quote" is a fabrication.  It was invented by the American writer, soap-salesman and eccentric Elbert Hubbard in a 1908 book entitled  Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Teachers.  Hubbard chose Hypatia as one of his "great teachers" but was stymied by the awkward fact that we have virtually nothing of Hypatia's writings or teachings, making it a bit hard to present her as "great".  He solved this problem by simply making some up, including the wise words above.

Prothero goes on to praise Agora as "a gem of a movie" and to describe its production values, sets and so on.  No problems there, but then he plunges headfirst into some bold statements about history:

The central story revolves around Hypatia of Alexandria (born ca. 350 to 370 A.D, died 415 A.D.), who lived in Hellenistic Alexandria during the final death throes of the Roman Empire. 

"Final death throes"? Alexandria was part of the Eastern Roman Empire, which did not fall until a whopping 1038 years after Hypatia's death.  Those are some pretty long "death throes".  Prothero goes on:

Most of the historical events portrayed in the film is as accurate as historians can know them, from the religious tension to the destruction of the Alexandrian library (and its priceless collection of the works of the ancients) by a black-clad Christian mob who viewed philosophy and learning as pagan and idolatrous, to the eventual subjugation of the Roman Empire by Christian leaders.

Of course, very few of the events depicted in the film are accurate at all, as my two previous articles on this movie's liberties with history have shown (see "Agora" and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again and  Hypatia and "Agora" Redux).  There is no evidence of any library in the Serapeum and the idea that "Christian leaders" regarded philosophy and learning as "pagan and idolatrous" is simply nonsense.  Prothero then assures us that "Hypatia is practically the only prominent female name among scholars in the ancient world", which is also wrong.  Just a generation after Hypatia, for example, we have another famed female philosopher in Alexandria, Aedisia.  Not only was she a famous scholar and teacher and a woman, but she was also a pagan.  Yet somehow she managed to remain entirely unmolested by black-clad Christian mobs, which should give a bit of a hint that the portrayal of history in this film that Prothero finds so rock solid is actually not telling us the truth.

Prothero tells us Hypatia "may or may not have invented the astrolabe and the hydrometer".  His caution is wise, since these claims have no basis at all.  The idea that she "invented" the hydrometer is based on a letter to her from Synesius asking her to get one made for him.  Why this letter has led to the idea that she invented the instrument is a puzzle, since in it Synesius has to explain to her what a hydrometer is and how it works.  That would be odd if she was the instrument's inventor.  Clearly he is asking her to get one made for him because there were instrument makers capable of the job in Alexandria and not in Lybia.  Prothero goes on:

The movie has her character questioning Ptolemaic astronomy and investigating the heliocentric model of Hipparchos of Samos, and coming up with Kepler’s elliptical orbits as a solution to the problem of heliocentrism. This last part is probably fiction, but then Hypatia has been such a symbol of science and feminism for centuries that nearly every author has embellished our ideas of her.

Actually, it's not just the "last part" that is fiction (there' no "probably" about it) -  there is zero evidence of Hypatia questioning the Ptolemaic model and, as the daughter of Ptolemy's best editor, the whole idea that she would is pretty fanciful.  Heliocentrism had long since been rejected by ancient astronomers on what were, at the time, quite reasonable grounds, so the idea that Hypatia dabbled with it is fantasy.  Of course, the film's promoters were happy to peddle it as history, with video of vox populi on the streets of a German city being used to advertise the film showing unsuspecting people being told that Hypatia discovered heliocentrism.  They are surprised that they have never heard this.  They shouldn't be, of course.  Because it's crap.  Prothero also gets his ancient scientists muddled up - the Samosian he was trying to refer to was Aristarchus, not Hipparchus of Samos.  The latter did study astronomy, but was definitely not a heliocentrist.

But no account of Hypatia is complete without the perpetuation of the myth that she was flayed alive:

And the ending, where her Christian former slave suffocates her to save her from a painful death for being a pagan and a witch, was not nearly as harsh as reality. According to historical records, a Christian mob kidnapped her from her chariot, stripped her naked, flayed her alive with sharp potsherds, and then dragged her skinned body through the streets.

We than thank our old pal Edward Gibbon for this one - a guy who is the point of origin for many persistent historical myths.   What Socrates Scholasticus tells us about the nature of her death was that the mob used "ὄστρακα" to kill her.  An "ostrakon" could be a potsherd.  Or it could be an oyster shell, which is how Gibbon interpreted the word and so came up with the idea Hypatia was flayed with sharp shells.  But while the image of a naked woman being flayed alive with sharp shells or potsherds is suitably lurid and dramatic, the word ὄστρακα here most likely refers to roof tiles.  Hypatia was stoned to death with the projectiles that would have been most readily at hand in an Alexandrine street: terracotta roof tiles.  Of course, that's not exactly a pleasant way to go out, but for some reason people seem to prefer the idea of her being flayed alive.  The quote from Scholasticus in the Wikipedia entry on Hypatia even changes his plain statement "they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles" to "they completely stripped her, and then murdered her by scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell", which is not even remotely close to what Scholasticus wrote.  I suppose one way to get the evidence to conform to pseudo historical myth is to simply change the source material.*

But then Prothero gets down to ideological brass tacks:

But although the historical details could be quibbled over, the main point of the movie rings true, especially in this current age where religious dogmatism is still attempting to suppress science and free inquiry. 

The movie actually has a lot more to do with "this current age" than it does with anything that happened in the Fifth Century.   Prothero has certainly bought the message of its fable.  It's another manifestation of the old "Conflict Thesis" that seems to be reinforced by the actual, very modern, conflict between reactionary fundamentalist Biblical literalists and modern science.  For Prothero, as for many people without a good grasp of the history of science, if (some) religious types are opposed to proper science today then it makes sense that they must have always done so.  Therefore he likes the fact that this is being reinforced by Amenábar's movie and is oblivious to the fact that Amenábar has had to distort history to get it to conform to the "Conflict" model.

Of course, the problem here is that actual historians of science have long since abandoned the "Conflict Thesis" and debunked the Nineteenth Century works of ideologues like John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White, whose books fixed this idea in the popular imagination.  Gary Ferngren neatly summarises the current state of play amongst professional historians on this subject:

While some historians had always regarded the Draper-White thesis as oversimplifying and distorting a complex relationship, in the late twentieth century it underwent a more systematic reevaluation. The result is the growing recognition among historians of science that the relationship of religion and science has been much more positive than is sometimes thought. Although popular images of controversy continue to exemplify the supposed hostility of Christianity to new scientific theories, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavour, while at other times the two have co-existed without either tension or attempts at harmonization. If Galileo and the Scopes trial come to mind as examples of conflict, they were the exceptions rather than the rule. (Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, p. ix)

For some modern ideologues, however, this will not do at all.  They want the "Conflict Thesis" to be true and get mighty cross with these pesky historians when they find they no longer accept the old "the Church suppressed science" idea that they like so much.  The odd coterie of atheists of the particularly grumpy variety over at Butterflies and Wheels, for example, are having none of this fashionable nonsense about religion perhaps actually nurturing science and dismiss such outrageous poppycock as "revisionism".  When confronted by the awkward fact that the "Conflict Thesis" is rejected by leading historians of science such as Ronald Numbers, David Lindberg and Edward Grant, they are forced to resort to conspiracy theories - apparently these learned and celebrated scholars are all being bribed by the evil Templeton Foundation and are thus being swayed by wicked theists to compromise their academic careers and reputations and adopt an "accomodationist" stance on history.  Don your tinfoil hat now.  Not surprisingly, everyone's favourite retired high school teacher Charles Freeman has found his natural home on that odd little blog.

It seems the history of science simply can't be left to mere historians to write, since they don't write the version of history that some of my fellow atheists would like, which is very irritating to the grumpy anti-theistic movement.  Luckily we have scientists who are happy to venture out of their fields and set those silly, muddle-headed award winning renowned historians straight.  Particle physicist and grumpy anti-theist Victor J. Stenger is about to deal a mighty blow to all revisionist historians and Templeton Foundation quislings with his upcoming book God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion .  I have my copy on pre-order, so expect a review here in coming months.  The George Sarton Medal committee has been informed.

Speaking of scientists dabbling with history, back to Professor Prothero.  "Late Roman Alexandria was  indeed a tolerant place" he tells us, "where the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman gods were still worshiped."  There might be an alternative universe where pre-Christian Alexandria was a "tolerant place", but here in our world it was anything but.  Novelist Mike Flynn's series of articles "The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria" show that Alexandria was a hotbed of street violence, political killings, factional brawling and inter-faith conflict long before Christianity was added to the mix.  The city has the dubious distinction of being the site of several of the earliest recorded anti-Jewish pogroms.  And the "tolerance" of this notably intolerant city did not extend to Christians for the first three hundred years of that faith's history.  Like Manicheans, Alexandrine Christians were subjected to periodic bouts of Roman "tolerance" that involved "tolerant" things like being burned alive in arenas, being crucified and being fed to wild animals.  As the man hanging in the cell in The Life of Brian said "Terrific people, the Romans".  Very "tolerant".

We then get Prothero telling us about how the Christians destroyed the library-that-wasn't-there in the Serapeum and then this statement:

Many scholars still consider the murder of Hypatia and the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity (with the destruction of nearly all Greek and Roman scholarship) as the beginning of the “Dark Ages” in the west.

"Many scholars"?  Really?  Such as who?   No scholar with a clue would consider any such thing, since if we can read any Greek or Roman scholarship at all we have a Christian scribe to thank for the privilege.  The Grumpy Anti-theist Brigade love this idea of the quaintly named "Dark Ages" being ushered in by Christianity and wicked book-burning Christians, though they get frustrated (and annoyed) by pesky rationalists who dare to ask them to present some evidence of this "destruction".  They usually try the "Christians burned the Great Library" tack, but when the rug gets pulled out from under them on that score, they get rather cross when they find they have nothing else they can cite.  Pesky historians attribute the loss of knowledge in western Europe to the not inconsequential effects of the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire, but that's no fun for an anti-theistic ideologue.  And it's strange that when Prothero was writing that sentence above it didn't occur to him to ponder how the events of Hypatia's life caused the collapse of learning "in the west" when she lived in the east.  That should have been a hint that something else was going on.

Naturally, Galileo is now invoked along with a reference to Creationism.  Then we are told that "the intolerant Christian mobs that came to rule the late Roman Empire were in turn defeated and driven out of Alexandria by even more fanatical Muslim armies and rulers, who destroyed what little remained of classical civilization that the Christians had not already burned or banished".  Again, we seem to be in some alternative universe's history here, since in the real world the naughty old Muslims actually took the Greek and Roman knowledge that had been preserved by wicked Byzantine and Nestorian monks and expanded on it, carrying it to Spain where it was eagerly embraced by Medieval Christian scholars and returned to the west.  But that story is no fun at all.  Pesky historians and their pesky facts and evidence ruin it for everyone.

Prothero ends with a fine flourish by talking about "Christians suppressing the heretical notion that the Earth is round".  I suppose if you write a post peppered with totally discredited pseudo historical myths and demonstrate a high school level and totally cartoonish grasp of history you might as well end with an absolute doozy - the old "flat earth myth".  Many of his readers lapped up this serving of the "Conflict Thesis" with comments like "this film really made me angry, and yet it also made me proud to be a freethinker".  When one tries to caution that Agora actually took liberties with history, Prothero counters by claiming "so little is known about “facts” back in 400 AD that scholars have very little that is well documented and non-controversial".  What? So we can just make up any crap we like then?  Several events in this movie are actually extremely well documented.  The destruction of the Serapeum is one of the best documented events in ancient history, with no less than five separate independent accounts of it.  Oddly, none of them mention any library there or any destruction of books.  Not even the hostile, anti-Christian philosopher Eunapius' account. And the contemporary accounts of Hypatia's death tell us it was caused by politics and had nothing to do with religion or learning.  These accounts are entirely "non-controversial", but they don't support Amenábar's pseudo historical fable at all.

We also get some whackiness in the comments.  One "Dr Strangelove" informs us authoritatively that "Copernicus read Aristarchus".  It would be remarkable if he did, considering none of Aristarchus' worked survived to Copernicus' time or to ours.  The same commenter goes on to note "Galileo read Archimedes, Columbus and geographers read Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, Newton read Euclid, Kepler read Apollonius".  He doesn't seem to have noticed, however, that they read these ancient authors because Byzantine, Nestorian and western Catholic monks preserved their works.  So much for "book-burning Christians".  Then we get this gem:

The ancient Greeks already had prototype steam engines and mechanical computers. Had the Church not killed Alexandrian science, we could have the Industrial revolution 1,000 years before James Watt.

The "prototype steam engine" referred to here is the tiny aeolipile of Heron, a cute little toy that would never have led to an actual steam engine given the metals technology of the time.  The "mechanical computer" seems to be a reference to the Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator of a kind that continued to be produced for centuries later, without ushering in any "industrial revolution".  And the Church preserved Greek science, thanks substantially to the insistence of  another learned Alexandrine, Clement, who stressed that all knowledge was from God and that Greek rationalism was to be revered and not rejected.  But who wants to let pesky facts get in the way of pretty myths?

Luckily, at least some of the skeptics on Skepticblog actually have a true scepticism and went to do some fact checking on the movie.  One summed up what they found very nicely:

Too many modern attitudes pasted onto Roman-Hellenistic people. And too many modern attitudes about religion pasted onto early Christians. This wasn’t a historical drama, it was Narnia for atheists.

"Narnia for atheists" indeed.  One of the later posters linked to my critique of Agora's history.  That was nice of them, but I suspect it was a bit late - most of the "sceptics" had digested their serving of "history by a scientist" and moved on, prejudices confirmed and myths reinforced.  Unfortunately this junk is what passes for "rationalism" on the internet.  Sometimes this rationalist truly despairs.

* A reader of this blog has corrected the translation of Socrates Scholasticus' account of Hypatia's death quoted on Wikipedia, so it now reads correctly.  Let's see if it stays that way or if the zealots change it to conform to their fantasies again.

Postscript:  Here's one for the Irony Files.  The same Donald Prothero who wrote the error-laden post on Hypatia, the history of science and the supposed suppression of learning by the church later wrote a post on Skepticblog on the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  He defined this as the way "ignorant or unskilled people tend to overestimate their level of competence and expertise".  His post made good observations about the implications of Dunning and Kruger's findings, talking about examples of "incompetents who don’t recognize their incompetence, often shouting out their inanities and attempting to drown out their expert critics".

I couldn't resist noting in the comments on that post that a certain earlier Skepticblog post by Prothero on Hypatia and the history of science was a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, given that it was riddled with errors of fact and demonstrated what happens when "ignorant or unskilled people tend to overestimate their level of competence and expertise" in a field they know nothing about.  Interestingly, an hour or so after it was posted, my comment was suddenly edited out.  Luckily others had already noted it and commented unfavourably on its being censored.  I reposted it with a link the to post above and chided Prothero for removing my original comment.  This time the comment was allowed to stay.

"Rationalism"?

If Rome Hadn't Fallen by Timothy Venning

Timothy Venning, If Rome Hadn't Fallen: How the Survival of Rome Might Have Changed World History,(Pen and Sword, 2011) 224 pages,
Verdict?: 3/5 Interesting but ultimately unconvincing overall.

My primary school's library carried a British weekly educational magazine called Look and Learn, which had articles on science, history and culture for kids, as well as short fiction and a few weekly cartoon strips.  One of its slightly odder regular offerings was a space opera comic serial called "The Trigan Empire" - a kind of Dan Dare/Flash Gordon space adventure which caught my eye because the main characters, for reasons never explained, all wore Roman-style togas, robes and armour.  I can't say this strange cartoon ever really grabbed me, since beyond the Roman aesthetic it was simply B-grade sci-fi of a slightly quaint variety, but it seems to have made quite an impression on the young Timothy Venning;

Thanks are due to the staff who created the 'Trigan Empire' comic strip for Ranger and subsequently Look and Learn magazine, which first gave me the concept of 'what if' fantasy when I was at primary school in the late 1960s.  This innovative science-fiction series showed what a Roman-type civilization might have looked like if it had survived to the Space Age, particularly due to the artwork of Don Lawrence.  My exploration of the scenarios took off from there.
(Venning, "Acknowledgements", p. xvii)

With all due respect to the artwork of Don Lawrence, I still find myself asking the question I asked aged eight: "If they have space ships and lasers, why do they still fight with swords while wearing Roman helmets?"  That never made much sense to me.  Whether it made more sense to Venning or not is not clear, but it certainly got him thinking about a particular counterfactual historical scenario: what if the Roman Empire had survived?

The Trigan Empire or 'Romans in Space'

The Benefits and Pitfalls of Historical Hypotheticals

Counterfactuals, historical hypotheticals or "what if" scenarios are tricky things to pull off effectively, let alone in a way that sheds some light on history in any useful way.  At their best, the examination of what might have happened can help a historian to look at the evidence for what did happen in new ways, since constructing viable possible alternative paths that events may have taken requires a very careful re-examination of the evidence from different perspectives.  At their worst, they are self-indulgent fantasies where the examiner picks an outcome they find intriguing or appealing (Hitler conquers Britain or the British Government grants home rule to Ireland in 1896) and then works backwards to contrive a way that this outcome was actually highly "likely" if only a few small things had gone differently.  The worse kind of counterfactual depends heavily on a rather simplistic view of history; one where things tend to happen for single or simple reasons and only a little needs to have been different for totally different outcomes to result.

There are some examples of the better kind of counterfactual.  In 1997 Niall Ferguson edited a collection of hypotheticals called Virtual History: Alternatives And Counterfactuals, which examined the possible results of a number of scenarios, from Charles I avoiding the English Civil War to JFK living to win a second term of office.  As with all the better types of historical counterfactuals, these served to throw a new light on the events they imagined not happening - Dr Mark Almond's contribution "1989 Without Gorbachev: What if Communism had not collapsed?" certainly made me reassess the (usually still-accepted) American interpretation that the Soviet Union was rotten to its core and outspent and outflanked by brave Ronald Reagan and so would have fallen apart anyway.

Unfortunately, the worse kind of counterfactual - the ones which are little more than self-indulgent fanboy fantasies based on creaking premises - are far more common.  Worst of all are the ones where the fantasy in question is based on wholly erroneous or ideologically biased historical assumptions.  The fantasy of the "hole in science created by Christianity" by an online polemicist called Jim West (and its attendant graph, aka "the Dumbest Thing on the Internet Ever") is a classic case of where ideologically-driven ignorant pseudo historical nonsense will get you if you switch off your brain.

Luckily Venning's grasp of the relevant history is extensive and detailed and so, on the whole, he manages to avoid the self-indulgent fanboy pitfalls.  Or at least he does for most of his intriguing book.

"The Fury of the Goths" - Paul Ivanovitz

The "Furor Teutonicus"

Like the post factum interpretation that the Soviet Union was ready to fall regardless of what Gorbachev did (which does not really explain why its fall was so totally unexpected and remarkable at the time - hindsight is a useful thing) there is a school of thought that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was inevitable.  It is one with a long pedigree - back in 1776 Gibbon asserted:

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident and removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long.

Several more recent analysts have been inclined, at least partially, to the same conclusion, most notably Adrian Goldworthy in his recent The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower (reviewed below), who sees the roots of the inevitable fall of the west in the chaos of the Third Century, though with seeds that went all the way back to Augustus.  The lack of a regular mechanism for succession was an inherent weakness of the Empire, according to Goldworthy, and this was made worse by the vast and unwieldy size of the Empire and its uneven recovery from the near collapse in the Third Century.  All this left the poorer, weaker western half of the Empire tottering and eventual collapse was pretty much a matter of time.

Venning, on the other hand, seems to think that it was at least possible that the west could have survived.  He acknowledges most of the things Goldsworthy points out, but feels they did not have to be fatal the Western Empire.  If a few things had been different, he argues, the Western Empire could have survived.

Venning does take a broad view of the reasons for the fall of the Western Empire, but it seems on the whole he subscribes to more of a "catastrophist" perspective, similar to that of Peter Heather in The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and the Barbarians.  Heather, a leading Germanicist, is very much of the view that the Empire did not die, it was murdered.  And it was the barbarian invasions that were the cause of death. So the first part of Venning's "what if" concentrates on the Germanic barbarians, and explores what he feels may have been the consequences if Tiberius and his successors had annexed all of northern Germania as far east as the Elbe.

His analysis focuses on two elements that he feels could have gone differently - the Teutoburgerwald disaster where Varus' three legions were annihilated by a Cheruscian uprising in 9 AD and Tiberius choosing to "rein in" Germanicus in his 15-16 AD campaign east of the Rhine.

Like many, Venning pins the Varian disaster squarely on Varus himself:

A better general than Varus would not have allowed himself to be led into a German trap far from the Rhine by supposedly loyal German 'scouts' or if he had done so he could have provided more inspiring leadership.
(Venning, p. 5)

People have been scapegoating Varus for what was a highly embarrassing defeat ever since the battle itself, so Venning is hardly alone here.  But the idea that it was all Varus' fault is actually only found in one of the sources: that of Vellius Paterculus.  And Paterculus had a family beef with Varus' family, the Quinctilii, and so we have to tread his blame of Varus with a degree of healthy scepticism.  The other sources paint Varus as a noble and courageous heroic figure and put the defeat primarily down to the cunning and military skill of his very wily and able opponent, the Cheruscian war-leader Arminius.  Venning seems very sure that "a better general" would not have "allowed himself" to be outfoxed by Arminius, but during Germanicus' later campaign his subordinate general Aulus Cæcina did just that.  Cæcina was no amateur, in fact as the commander of the lower Rhine legions and a veteran of forty campaigns, he was about as good a general as the Romans had.  Yet, just like Varus, he was led into a trap by Arminius and was on the verge of having the dubious distinction of being the second Roman general in five year to have three legions wiped out under his command when he was saved more by the ill-discipline of Arminius' warriors than any skill of his.  Like many Romanophiles, Venning seems to under-estimate Arminius' skill as a general, because that was what defeated Varus.

But Venning accepts that even if Varus had not been defeated, this would not have made a substantial difference to the longer-term position of the Romans vis a vis Germania. So he then looks at whether things may have been different if Germanicus had continued his campaigns east of the Rhine frontier and succeeded in taking the frontier up to the Elbe.  He argues that this could not only have provided Rome with a large source of Germanic military manpower but would also have resulted in more defensible frontiers:

Indeed, if the conquest of the Marcomanni in Bohemia by Marcus Aurelius in the late 170s had been followed through ... Rome could have been defending a frontier from the Elbe to the Carpathians rather than from the Rhine to the Danube.
(Venning, p. 7)

He argues that this shorter frontier would also have been far more defensible, since the Carpathian passes are far easier to hold than the long and rather porous frontiers provided by the Danube, since rivers in the ancient world were more conduits than barriers.  This last point is reasonable, but there are several problems with this section of Venning's argument.

To begin with, the whole idea that Germanicus was "reined in" by the jealousy of his wicked uncle Tiberius is a great story, but it is one with only one source: Tactius.  And in Tacitus' neat moral narrative Germanicus is the golden-haired wunderkind and the lost hope for what might have been, while Tiberius is the envious villain.  So while Tacitus paints Germanicus' campaign as a wholesale success with strings of glorious victories cut short by bad old Tiberius, there is evidence even in his account that things were not quite so rosy.  Leaving aside the fact that, as noted above, Cæcina narrowly escaped Varian Disaster Mark II, victories that Tacitus depicts as comprehensive do not seem to have been quite as clear cut as his story makes out.  Germanicus supposedly inflicts a crippling defeat on Arminius in the Battle of Idistoviso, yet only days later Arminius' supposedly comprehensively beaten army fights another battle at the Angrivarian Walls, which even Tacitus has to admit was something of a draw.  So as neat as Tacitus' story might be, there is good reason to believe that Germanicus withdrew because outright victory simply eluded him.

But the second problem with Venning's conclusion that conquering Germania up to the Elbe would make a difference lies in its assumptions about the significance of the Germanics in the fall of the Western Empire.  It assumes (with Heather) that the Germanic incursions were a primary cause of the fall of the Empire and not (as Goldsworthy argues, and I have to agree) more of a symptom of fundamental internal collapse.  Whenever the Empire had been weak before, the barbarians had tested and sometimes breached the frontiers.  They breached them permanently in the Fifth Century only because that time the internal collapse was terminal.

Even if the tribes west of the Elbe had been subdued, there were still plenty of tribes beyond the Elbe who could have exploited any weakness in the Empire - in fact, most of the tribes who carved out successor states in the old Western Empire were from further east anyway: the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Vandals and Lombards were all from beyond Venning's hypothetical stronger frontier.  And while the Carpathians may have been more defensible than the Danube, the Rhine would still have been porous and the even more defensible Alps did not prove much of a barrier in the Fifth Century anyway.  And that was because the Fifth Century Romans were locked in an endless cycle of petty civil wars that were fundamental to the spiral of decline, fragmentation and collapse.

The "Military Anarchy" and the Dominate

To his credit, Venning recognises that a victory by Varus or an northern frontier along the Elbe were unlikely to have made much difference at all:

Incompetent leadership and/or the bad luck of a civil war were crucial factors that better frontiers would not have affected.
(Venning, p. 8)

He refers to the relatively stable succession of emperors (hiccups like 69 AD aside) from Augustus to the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD as a "run of good luck".  He then explores some alternatives  by which this "good luck" could have gone on longer, avoiding the near collapse of the Empire in the Third Century and the consequences of that period which led to the final downfall in the Fifth Century.  Perhaps if Commodus' twin brother, Titus Aurelius Fulvus Antoninus, had not died aged four, he could have ruled alongside his brother and proven the better ruler, leaving his lazy and possibly mad twin to indulge his penchants for parties and gladiator fights.  Perhaps, but then again his brother could also have proven even worse than his brother for all we know.

Alternatively, he argues that Septimus Severus could have stabilised things after the civil war that resulted in the overthrow first of Commodus, then Pertinax and then Didius Julianus, arguing that the Empire had recovered from a similar civil war in the "Year of the Four Emperors" in 69 AD.  This is true to an extent, but the difference is that Vespasian had two able sons who were capable enough to secure stability via a dynasty that spanned 27 years.  Septimus Severus' son was Caracalla - a tyrant whose reign was seen as even less legitimate than that of his "foreign" father.

The stabilisation of the Empire by Vespasian and the Flavians had been because they had been able to quickly restore the facade that Goldsworthy calls "the veiled monarchy" - the shared fiction that hid the fact that the Roman Empire was a military dictatorship and always had been.  The Julio-Claudian, Flavian and Antonine dynasties had maintained stability by propping up this fiction, but it was inevitable that the facade would crumble eventually.  Venning explores some "what ifs" about Third Century emperors who may have stayed in power longer and so, perhaps, have restored the fiction of "the veiled monarchy".  I'm afraid I found this wishful thinking.  Like Goldsworthy, I feel that once the veil had been torn off the fiction was dead.  All that could save the Empire was what did save it (for a while): the establishment of a true, despotic and highly centralised monarchy that made no bones about its despotism - the one established by Diocletian.

The establishment of the Dominate, a new kind of emperor far more like an eastern demi-divine potentate and a new administrative structure pulled the Empire back from ruin, but in the west it ultimately contained the seeds of its own downfall.  A formal division between the eastern and western halves of the Empire was on the cards even before Diocletian and once it came in the later Fourth Century the western poor relation was highly vulnerable if not actually doomed.

The Calamitous Fifth Century

Venning's examination of the Fifth Century also examines some "what ifs", but again many of them fail to convince.  He suggests that all the consequences of the Goths being allowed to cross the Danube in 376 AD, including Alaric's later sack of Rome and the establishment of the Visigoth kingdom in Gaul and Spain, could have been avoided if Valens had handled the situation better.  That may be, but the later crossings of the Danube by Alatheus and Saphrax and then by Radagaisus shows that the pressures further east caused by the Hunnic incursion were pushing many tribes east and south.  If Fritigern's people had been refused entry or been settled peacefully, it is highly likely that some other migratory groups would have done more or less as the Goths did eventually.  The game of "what if" can be played many ways.

After rehearsing an overview of what he correctly refers to as "a vicious circle of gradual collapse" that saw some provinces abandoned, others lost due to virtually no resistance and the core of the Western Empire slowly dwindling as political and economic collapse spiraled out of control, Venning proposes how things could have been different:

Outlying provinces and their resources might have fallen away under the pressures of from outside from around 395, but the core of the Empire would have remained intact if there had been domestic stability and an unbroken run of powerful military leaders from Theodosius the Great to Stilicho to Constantius III to Aetius to the latter's heirs.
(Venning, p. 49)

The problem here is that the "domestic stability" on which the "if" in that sentence depends was never going to happen because the cycle of civil wars that Diocletian had arrested broke out again in the West.  This was actually precisely because of "powerful military leaders".  As Ian Hughes argues in his Stilicho: The Vandal Who Saved Rome, it was the concentration of military power in the hands of a single magister militium in the West which was a key fatal flaw in the Western Empire's administration. This never happened in the East and it was this factor that was one of the key differences in the fates of the two Empires.  That aside, outlying provinces did fall away and "the core of the Empire" did remain intact - for a while.  But the "core of the Empire" could not survive without being sustained by provinces like southern Gaul, parts of Spain and, particularly, Africa.  So the idea that a more politically stable "core" would have survived is hard to credit anyway.

From about this point the book becomes increasingly speculative, with all kinds of scenarios like the breakaway northern sub-Romans Gallic state of Aegidius and Syagrius for some reason being "likely to rally to the Empire" after a succession of other "what ifs" that have the "core of the Empire" coming back from the brink.  If anything, the sheer effort Venning has to go to so as to have the Western Empire survive served to underline for this reader exactly how inevitable its collapse really was.

Romans versus Mongols (ands Spiderman versus Batman?)

There is a silly meme on historical internet fora where people speculate which ancient peoples from different time periods would have prevailed over other such peoples if they could somehow have met in battle.  So ancient Japan fanboys argue at length with Roman fanboys over whether an army of samurai and yari-armed Japanese infantry troops could have beaten the armies of Trajan.  These debates have all the rigor of comic book nerds arguing if Spiderman could beat up Batman.  I must say that while I found Venning's faith that the fall of the Empire was not inevitable unconvincing, at least the first half of his book was a stimulating and detailed examination of that collapse and it made me look at these events from many fresh angles.

The second half, however, moves to try to hypothesise how a surviving Roman Empire would have shaped later history and as it went on it began to increasingly feel like a Spiderman versus Batman discussion.  Topics like how the Romans would have dealt with the Vikings or the Roman colonisation of the Americas (with Romans fighting Vikings in North America,  no less) began to feel increasingly contrived.

It also felt that anything about these later centuries that Venning liked, such as the Twelfth Century Renaissance or the Reformation, was considered "likely" to have still happened under his hypothetical continued Roman Empire.  While things he does not like do not appear in his contracuted alternative history.  And things he seems to think would be cool, of course, do happen, however implausible or even silly they may be.  By the time we get to the Romans resisting and containing the armies of Islam and gloriously expanding to the Hindu Kush to tackle the Mongols, we are not quite at the level of the "Trigan Empire" comics that inspired the young Venning, but we are getting dangerously close.

This is a mildly intriguing book on the whole and the first half is an interesting way of re-examining history.  For this reader, the second, far more speculative half was not so fruitful, but others may enjoy it.  After all, maybe a Viking would kill a ninja and Batman would make short work of Spiderman.  Who knows.

The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

Tom Holland, The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West , (Anchor, 2008) 512 pages,
Verdict?: 4/5 An elegant and eloquent overview of a neglected turning point.

When most people think of the Middle Ages they tend to have a Hollywood conception in mind - castles, knights, armour, damsels, monks etc - as well as the usual cliches about it being a "dark age", a time of ignorance and superstition and a period in which the Catholic Church reigned supreme.  That latter cliche can range from a syrupy and pious romanticisation of the period as an "Age of Faith" to the more common conception of the Medieval Church as nothing more than an institution of dark oppression which kept "the people" ignorant and so ruled Europe as a vile theocracy that held everyone in an iron grip until the Reformation made everything okay again.  Or something.  It often comes as a surprise to people when I explain to them that most of the history of the Medieval Church was one of a weak and vulnerable institution struggling for survival and then struggling to free itself from secular domination.  The caricatured Medieval Church of Protestant Sunday school lessons, countless Hollywood movies and the popular imagination (even the popular imagination of many modern Catholics) is based on the Church of the very end of the Middle Ages - a Church that ultimately won most of its battles to free itself from secular domination.  The Church of the earlier centuries of that struggle was nothing like the one most people think they "know".

Tom Holland began his career as a novelist and it shows from the elegant flowing prose in his popularisations of history.  His first non-fiction work was Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003), which took Julius Caesar's crossing the River Rubicon with his army and triggering a war with the Senate as a key turning point in history.  Two years later he released Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the Westwhich dealt with another turning point, the Battle of Thermopylae and the first clash between east and west in Europe. In both cases Holland took two reasonably well-known events and characters and used them to explore their wider contexts and cast some light on their significance for us today.  In The Forge of Christendom he chooses a much more obscure event as his turning point, but still does an admirable job of expanding on its context, even if he may be less successful at convincing of its modern significance.

Henry IV and his Anti-pope Clement III

Henry IV Goes to Canossa

On January 27 1077 AD Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Romans and the Germans and Caesar of western Christendom, stood barefoot in the snow under the small castle of Canossa, wearing the hairshirt of a penitent.  For three days he had waited outside the gate of the remote fortress, fasting and praying, while inside Pope Gregory VII and his ally Countess Matilda of Tuscany pondered whether to let him in.  This confrontation formed the climax of a two year struggle over what became a key question: who has the right to appoint bishops and abbots and other religious  office holders, the Church itself or secular rulers?  In 1075 Pope Gregory had set down the Dictatus papae, a set of axioms regarding the powers of the Pope and the Church that were the culmination and effective manifesto of the Cluniac reform movement that had been slowing gaining influence for the last five decades or more.  The Dictatus stated the key aims of the reform movement that had begun at the influential French Benedictine monastery of Cluny, but it was the fact that it stated that the Pope alone could appoint or depose churchmen and move or depose bishops that sparked the confrontation with the Holy Roman Emperor.

In a period in which bishoprics came with land and feudal duties and provided kings with political support, revenues and troops, the idea that a bishop could be appointed by a Pope alone was political anathema to a ruler like Henry IV.  He had spent a decade and a half struggling to raise his power from that of a child regent dominated by the great lords of Germany to the supreme ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, more powerful even than his father.  His ability to appoint favoured noblemen to powerful bishoprics and his capacity to sell Church appointments to the highest bidder as a source of revenue were key foundations to that hard-won power.  The Church reformers' ideology was not a threat while it remained theoretical or when it was simply aimed at ensuring priests were reasonably literate and pious.  But when the low-born but highly intelligent son of a village blacksmith, Hildebrand of Sovana, became Pope Gregory VII, the movement had effectively taken control of the Church and Gregory was ready for an ideological showdown.  The Dictatus' condemnations of lay investiture of bishops and "simony" (the selling of benefices) were bad enough, but Gregory also stated "it is permitted for (the Pope) to depose Emperors".  Not surprisingly, Henry struck back.

He sent Gregory an open letter declaring it was the Pope who was to be deposed.  It opened with the  sneering declaration "Henry, king not through usurpation but through the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk" and ended by thundering "I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down, and be damned throughout the ages!"  These were fighting words and a direct counter to Gregory's audacious new claims to authority.  And they were hardly empty words - unlike Gregory, Henry IV had armies at his disposal and all involved knew that if push came to shove he could and would march on Italy and depose the Pope by military force.

The Coronation of Charlemagne, from a later Medieval illumination

The Weakness of the Early Medieval Popes

In past centuries, that would have been the end of the matter.  Any previous Pope arrogant or mad enough to challenge the Holy Roman Emperor in this way would have been forced to quickly back down.  This is because the Popes of the first centuries of Christianity were vulnerable and weak.  While they had always maintained a claim to some form of ecclesiastical supremacy as successors of Saint Peter, in practice the Papa in Rome had become little more than the petty bishop of a shrunken city of relics and ruins with little influence beyond Rome's crumbling walls and often little more within them.

A few early Popes had successfully extended their influence into the rest of western Europe: notably Gregory the Great in the Seventh Century, who commissioned missionaries as far afield as Britain and the Rhineland to win back to the sphere of the Church territories lost to pagan barbarians.  But in the following centuries the Papacy became the plaything of local politics and vulnerable to the ruthless Lombard dukes who came to dominate northern and central Italy and to the squabbling factions in Rome itself.  In 799 AD the hapless Pope Leo III fell foul of the nobles of Rome and narrowly escaped having his eyes gouged out and his tongue removed.  He was forcibly deposed and sent to live in a monastery, but escaped and fled to the Frankish kingdom to the north, where he appealed to the powerful king of the Franks called Charles, later known as Charlemagne.  The Frankish king descended on Italy with an army and the hapless Pope in tow, exiled his opponents and restored Leo to the Papacy.  In return, and apparently to Charlemagne's surprise and chagrin, on Christmas Day 800 AD the Pope crowned the Frankish king as Emperor of a new and restored Roman Empire in the west.

It is generally thought that this move was entirely Leo's idea, though Charlemagne was hardly going to object.  This action established the Holy Roman Empire, with Charlemagne's various descendants taking the Imperial title right down to its final dissolution by Francis II in 1806.  Essentially what Leo wanted was to secure his relationship with the Frankish kings as protectors of a vulnerable and politically weak Papacy.  And the Popes did get the protection of the succession of Emperors, though the relationship entangled the Papacy and the Emperorship in a number of ways that were to have a profound effect on the history of Europe.  There was a long precedent for this kind of Imperial protection/dominance of the Church: ever since the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity back in 312 AD the various Roman emperors had been patrons and protectors of the Church.  And in the Byzantine Empire that tradition continued, with the Emperor often more religiously influential than any bishop or patriarch.  But since 476 AD there had been no Roman Emperor in western Europe and Leo III was not really reviving an old political and religious dynamic but creating a new one.

Initially Charlemagne and his successors tried to make it clear that they were the senior partners in this odd new relationship with the Church and Papacy.  Charlemagne's son Louis succeeded him to the title of Emperor, though Charlemagne pointedly crowned his son as co-Emperor and successor himself and did so in his Frankish Imperial capital without inviting or consulting the Pope.  But Frankish laws of succession tended to divide up territory amongst multiple sons and so Louis' Empire was divided in three among Charlegmagne's grandsons, setting the scene for a series of internecine wars in which rivals to the Imperial title increasingly turned to a coronation by the Pope of the day for added legitimacy.  So just as the Popes came to benefit from the protection and prestige of the new line of Emperors, so the Imperial successors and pretenders benefited from the blessing of the Popes.

A bare half-century on from the momentous Christmas Day of 800, and Leo's shade could have been well pleased.  Only a Pope, it was now accepted, had the power to bestow an imperial crown. (Holland, p. 62)

 But it was an uneasy relationship.

"The Beast and the Serpent" - From Beatus of Liebana's commentary

The Riders of the Apocalypse

Holland goes on to detail the centuries of turmoil and invasion that followed. The divided kingdoms of Charlemagne's descendants fractured and the Imperial title continued, though in diminished status, in the Ninth Century.  But in 936 it passed to the Saxon king Otto I; ironically a descendant of the pagan tribes Charlemagne had converted by the sword in a series of bloody wars over a century earlier.  The Europe of Otto and his dynasty, however, was one under constant attack from almost all sides.  To the east and south Islam was overwhelming Africa, expanding in Spain and conquering the islands of the Mediterranean.  From the east came a renewed threat from nomadic raiders, with the pagan Hungarians pushing into western Europe.  And from the north the Vikings who had raided far up the rivers of Frankia in the previous century returned to devastate the North Sea coasts.  Holland notes that these disasters and threats fed a religious fear of the coming of the End Times and the approach of the final apocalypse which he claims became more pronounced as the millennium - the year 1000 AD - approached.

Anyone who remembers the nonsense that attended the approach of the year 2000 will know some of the irrational fears that round numbered dates seem to hold for a certain type of people.  And there is no doubt that Revelation 20:1-3 has some cryptic things to say about Satan being bound for "one thousand years" and then "set free for a short time" to wreak havoc in the last days before the return of Christ.  But Holland's attempts to link many of the often quite disparate themes in his long book to a widespread fear of the year 1000 AD (or 1033 AD, a millennium after the Crucifixion) are not really very successful.  The real focus in the book is on the pivotal events of 1077 and attempts to link them to millennial fervour feel rather strained.  There is no doubt there were fears of the coming apocalypse in this time, but as Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages details, this was a mainstay of Medieval religious thought long before and long after 1000 AD and hardly unique or even particularly acute in the lead up to the end of the Tenth Century.

The later Tenth Century did turn out to be a turning point in many respects despite this.  In 955 Otto I gained massive prestige by winning an against-all-odds victory against a massive invading Hungarian army at Lechfeld, ending the threat from the east and beginning a long process of the expansion of Christendom eastwards.  In Spain the formerly powerful Caliphate of Córdoba went into a spiral of decline over several decades that would see its final collapse in 1031.  Back in 911 the Viking chieftain Hrólfr ("Rollo" to the Franks) swore allegiance to King Charles III, founding the Duchy of Normandy and bring the Viking depredations of mainland western Europe to an end.  And with all these turning points against western Europe's external threats came an increasing prosperity and an increasing expansion by western Christendom.  Change was beginning to sweep through Europe.

The Consecration of the Abbey of Cluny

The "White Mantle of Churches"

Holland may overstate the significance of the year 1000, but it is clear that even the denizens of the early Eleventh Century could feel something was happening.  Around 1027 the monk and chronicler Rodulfus Glaber wrote of a sense that things were transforming and changing for the better.    "It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free," he wrote, "shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches."  Certainly the new century saw new manifestations of piety among nobles and the common people.  As the nobility took advantage of any periods of lesser central royal power, castle-building and a consolidation of feudal structures increased across Europe.  These stronger fiefdoms also led to increased low-level warfare between the great lords, as they jockeyed for land and supremacy.  But at the same time there was an increase in lay piety as peasants, increasingly stripped of former rights by the new power structures, turned to the Church for help.

One source of Church authority that was particularly revered was the new wave of austere monasticism that emanated from the abbey in which Glaber had been writing - great Benedictine abbey of Cluny.  It had been founded in 910 by William I, Duke of Aquitaine, who granted a valley which had held his favourite hunting lodge as the basis for the new abbey to atone for a murder.  Remarkably, the Duke stated that he did not want to appoint the abbey's abbots and made the institution wholly independent.  Cluny established itself as entirely financially independent of the feudal system as well and went on to establish a network of daughter houses founded on the same principles of self-sufficiency, independence, piety, scholarship and, most of all, reform.

The great reform movement that swept through the Church in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries had Cluny and its network at its heart.  The reformers railed against the idea of a Church subservient to secular power and intertwined with the lay structures of feudal fiefdoms.  They championed the protection of the weak and the support of the poor and upheld the rights of peasants in the face of growing aristocratic power and increased internecine warfare.  And, most of all, they condemned the investiture of abbots and bishops by secular lords and "simony": the sale of Church offices for profit by the nobility and kings up to and including the Holy Roman Emperor.

This was a direct threat to the power of kings, but the reformers had the support of the common people and for the first time in centuries the commoners began to flex their political muscle.  The reformers strove to curtail the petty wars and depredations of robber barons and oppressive castellans, entering war-torn regions and declaring "the Truce of God".  Nobles who attended their prayer rallies with a view to scorning the whole idea found themselves confronted by thousands of pious commoners and were shamed into taking oaths of peace on holy relics - oaths they later found hard to break.

But as the Cluniac reform movement gained influence and its zealots climbed higher in the hierarchy of the Church, it was only a matter of time before there was a ideological showdown.  And that came when  Henry IV tried to depose Gregory VII.

"Not Pope but False Monk"

When Henry IV sought to depose Gregory VII, as the "false monk", in 1076 he expected little real resistance.  For the last several hundred years nobles had been used to appointing and deposing bishops and prelates at will and Emperors had deposed and replaced Popes many times before: Henry's own father had deposed no fewer than three Popes.  But Gregory and his advisers were products of the Cluniac system and fired with the zeal of reform.  The Pope countered Henry's declaration of his deposition by the audacious step of excommunicating the Emperor.  In previous centuries his largely symbolic step may have had little impact, but in the reforming age of the Eleventh Century it swung the mood of the common people against Henry.  Scenting blood, the ever fractious German nobles withdrew their support for the Emperor.  A rebellion rekindled in Saxony and the princes of Germany met to elect a new Emperor and depose Henry (failing only because they could not agree on a successor).

Henry saw the tide was turning against him and he began to march on Italy to see the Pope.  Thinking Henry was coming to depose Gregory by force, Countess Matilda of Tuscany gave him sanctuary in the castle of Canossa, but when the Emperor arrived it was in the hairshirt of a penitent, begging for the Pope to forgive him and lift his excommunication.  This left Gregory with a difficult choice:

The king's manoeuvre had comprehensively outflanked him.  As a result, he found himself confronted by an agonising dilemma.  Absolve Henry, Gregory knew, and all the confidence that the German princes had placed in him would inevitably be betrayed.  Refuse to show the humbled king mercy, however, and he would be betraying the duty that he owed to the Almighty himself. (Holland, p. 432)

In the end the devout religious man won out over the politician in Gregory and he relented, lifting his excommunication.  The short-term political result was a disaster for the Pope.  Henry turned on his rebel lords and defeated and killed the usurping king they had raised, then he returned to Italy in full military force in 1081 with the intention of finally deposing Gregory and installing his own Anti-pope.  Ironically, Gregory was forced to turn to another secular power, the militant Norman lords of southern Italy, to help him.  They rode north and rescued him, sacking and burning Rome itself in the process.  The people turned against Gregory as a result of the Norman depredations and he was finally deposed and taken south by the booty-laden Normans, where he died in despair in Salerno in 1084.  His bitter last words were said to have been "I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile."

The First European Revolution

This complex tale of the intrigues of, to most, long-forgotten Popes and Emperors in the "dark ages" may seem utterly irrelevant to many.  But Holland does a good job of pointing to its significance and explaining why Gregory's struggle with Henry reshaped Europe and actually made it exceptional, laying the foundations for some aspects of later European dominance.  Because while Gregory died thinking he had failed, his reforms were ultimately triumphant.  The total dominance of secular powers over the Church was broken and never re-established.  Later Popes waged ever more assertive battles for independence from secular politics and reached a pinnacle of influence in the Thirteenth Century under Innocent III before suffering a collapse of prestige in the Reformation.  But never again was the Church and religion fully under the domination of any state:

Gregory himself did not live to witness his ultimate victory - the cause for which he fought was destined to establish itself as perhaps the defining characteristic of western civilisation.  That the world can be divided into church and state, and that these twin realms should be distinct from each other: here are the presumptions that the eleventh century made 'fundamental to European society and culture, for the first time and permanently.' (Holland, p. 13)  

He quotes R.I. Moore, whose book The First European Revolution: c. 970-1215 traces this remarkable development and who observes "it is not easy for Europe's children to remember that it might have been otherwise" (Moore, p. 12) and notes one of the reasons for some disquiet in the west at any influx of Muslim immigrants, however small or peaceful, is that "to a pious Muslim the notion that the political and religious spheres can be separated is a shocking one - as it was to many of Gregory's opponents." (p. 14)

Holland's book is a sprawling epic and could be one that the non-Medievalist would find hard to keep straight in their head.  He begins with Henry and Gregory at Canossa but then takes a long sweep through several centuries of background and context before coming back to that climactic confrontation and its implications about 400 dense pages later.  Those who can see what he is doing should be able to follow along, but more casual readers may find themselves wondering about the relevance of lengthy digressions into the trading networks of the Rus Vikings on the Volga or the intricate diplomacy of the Byzantine court. As noted above, the attempt to use the idea of the coming apocalypse as a unifying theme is under-baked in places, though on the whole he does manage to hold the whole thing together.  What makes this book a joy to read is not simply the breadth of scholarship he manages to digest and lay out for the lay reader, but the fact that this novelist does it with a fiction-writer's elegance of phrase.  Otto II does not simply ride south to Italy, his "great force of iron-sheathed loricati ... clattered southwards".  And they do not simply find a land devastated by Saracen sea-raiders but rather "there, as the Saxons watered their horses, they found no vineyards, or villages, or fields, but only desolation - and over it all a stillness like that of a rifled grave.  Terror, in southern Italy, came surest by the sea." (p. 103)

The best popular histories do not simply digest scholarship about the past for the general reader, they make it come vividly to life.  Through the eloquence and elegance of his prose, Holland does that superbly.

Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that Show Jesus Never Existed at All by David Fitzgerald

David Fitzgerald, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All, (Lulu.com, 2010) 246 pages,
Verdict?: 0/5 A tragic waste of probably rather nice trees.

Barely a day goes by without being reminded that the internet is revolutionising publishing.  Record companies are struggling to compete with artists who can release music direct to the public, e-publishing teens are making millions selling young adult novels via Kindle and we keep hearing predictions of the death of print newspapers.  Part of this revolution is the fact that e-publishing and online "print-on-demand" self-publishing services like Lulu.com and Blurb mean that anyone can be a published author.  The upside of this is that worthy writers of novels, short stories or poetry that have a market but are unlikely to get a traditional publisher can find their audience.  Or someone writing a technical book on an obscure subject, such as how to dress and cook a swan or construct a Tudor ruffed collar, can do the same.  The downside is that now all the cranks, lunatics, crackpot theorists or ranting loons who used to clutter the net with websites preaching their fringe theses have self-published books all over Amazon.com as well.  I suppose you take the good with the bad.

One fringe idea that  has helped keep the print-on-demand publishers ticking along is the Jesus Myth hypothesis - the idea that not only was Jesus not what Christianity claims, but that there was no historical Jesus at all and that the stories about him are purely mythical in origin.  This is a thesis that has been hovering off on the fringe of New Testament scholarship for quite some time - Charles François Dupuis and Constantin-François Chassebœuf both proposed that Jesus never existed back in the Eighteenth Century, though it was first presented in any detail by the German historian Bruno Bauer in 1841.

Later Nineteenth Century ideas about the origin and development of religion, inspired and typified by Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, tried to find a single, overarching framework or template for all religions and the vogue for this idea lent itself to the theory that Christianity arose purely out of earlier religious traditions, with Jesus as a mythic "dying and rising god" figure representing rebirth, fertility and the cycle of the seasons.  This formed the basis of some Jesus myth theories by several early Twentieth Century Jesus Mythers; most of whom were enthusiastic amateurs like American mathematician William Benjamin Smith (Ecce Deus: The Pre-Christian Jesus, 1894), Scottish MP J.M. Robertson ( A Short History of Christianity, 1902) and philosopher Arthur Drewes (The Christ Myth, 1909), along with a variety of Theosophists, esotericists and proto-New Age writers.  However mainstream scholarship moved away from the assumptions and methodology of Frazer's anthropology of religion and the idea of Jesus as purely mythical never gained substantial traction.  With the exception of John Allegro's eccentric hippy version of the thesis (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 1968), the idea reached an low ebb even amongst amateur theorists by the 1970s.

More recently, however, it has experienced something of a revival, partly on the back of the internet and cheaper and easier small publishing and online distribution.  The new Jesus Mythers tend to fall into three broad categories.  The first consists of theorists who do not quite claim there was no historical Jesus, but rather that he was not who most scholars believe he was - an early First Century preacher prophet.  These are classic pseudo historical conspiracy theories that claim Jesus was "really" some other historical figure, such as Julius Caesar (Francesco Carrota, Was Jesus Caesar?, 2005) or the Emperor Titus (Joseph Atwill, Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, 2005).

The second and far more popular category consists of New Age works reviving (and largely recycling) early Twentieth Century esoteric and Theosophist versions of the thesis, with heavy emphasis on pagan parallels with Christianity as "proof" Jesus simply evolved out of earlier pagan gods.  British mystical writers Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy brought out a version of this thesis in 1999 with the publication of The Jesus Mysteries: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God?  It was marketed squarely at the kind of reader who devoured Holy Blood Holy Grail and, not surprisingly, its sequel is mentioned in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.  A more convoluted version of the same ideas has been presented in several books by a New Age writer who calls herself "Acharya S", but whose real name is Dorothy Murdock.  Beginning with The Christ Conspiracy in 1999, Murdock has proven adept at harnessing the internet to propagate her ideas.  She uses YouTube videos and an extensive website to sell her self-published books and has developed a cult-like following of almost fanatical disciples.  Her "archaeoastronomical" thesis of Jesus as a solar deity got a boost from the notorious underground conspiracy "documentary" Zeitgeist, which somehow managed to link her thesis to conspiracies about 9/11, international banking and the media.

The final category of Myther theories are ones that tend to have been propagated by anti-theistic atheists or seized on by them as a way to attack traditional Christianity.  Most popular amongst them is that of Canadian writer Earl Doherty, whose self-published book The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (1999) developed out of his website of the same name.  Unlike Freke, Gandy and Murdock, Doherty at least tries to use proper academic processes and approaches and his work is much more popular amongst atheists, freethinkers and humanists as a result.  Doherty does not place the same emphasis on pagan parallels as the New Age proponents of the thesis, but argues for an Jewish proto-Christianity (several of them, in fact) that considered Jesus to be a purely mythic being who was born, lived and died in the sub-lunar circle of the heavens, not on earth.  Several other amateurs and hobbyists, like Richard Carrier and R.G. Price, propose or support similar ideas, with several of them pushing this thesis at secptics' conventions, in atheist gatherings and on atheistic and humanist online fora.

Fitzgerald's False Dichotomy

Which brings us to David Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald is an atheist activist who is on the board of the San Francisco Atheists and the founder of an atheist film festival.  He has spent some time giving public lectures that are essentially summaries of his book, mainly to secularist organisations and conventions.  His book has certainly received high praise from prominent atheists and Mythers.  Robert M. Price, who is one of the two or three actual professional scholars who give the Myther thesis any credence, wrote a blurb which says it "summarizes a great number of key arguments with new power and original spin".  American Atheist Press editor and biologist Frank Zindler says Fitzgerald "reveals himself to be the brightest new star in the firmament of scholars who deny historical reality to 'Jesus of Nazareth'".  Atheist activist Richard Carrier gives a kind of imprimatur, declaring solemnly and authoritatively "All ten points (in the book) are succinct and correct".  And fellow self-published author and Myther guru Earl Doherty goes so far as to say it is "possibly the best 'capsule summary' of the mythicist case I've ever encountered."  But it seems such high praise from Myther luminaries does not count for much with publishers - like most Myther books, Nailed is self-published.

So is it as powerful as its blurbs declare?  Well, actually, no.  On the whole it is confused, lopsided and, in places, laughably amateurish.  If this is the best "mythicism" can produce then it's small wonder the academy remains singularly unimpressed.

As its title suggests, the book is divided into ten "myths" about Jesus, which the author then proceeds to attempt to debunk and show that a historical Jesus never existed. The first - "The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous" - is not really controversial.  After all, no-one except a fundamentalist apologist would pretend that the evidence about Jesus is not ambiguous and often difficult to interpret with any certainty, and that includes the evidence for his existence.  This, of course, merely means the idea he did not exist is simply valid, not that it's true. But from the start the attentive reader begins to notice something very odd about the way Fitzgerald frames the debate.  He consistently depicts the topic as some kind of starkly Manichaean conflict between Christian apologists on one hand and "critics who have disputed Christian claims" on the other and in his first pages he mentions evangelicals, conservative Christians and populist apologists like F.F. Bruce, R. Douglas Geivett and Josh McDowell in rapid succession.  He notes that the vast majority of Biblical historians reject the idea that Jesus never existed, but counters that "the majority of Biblical historians have always been Christian preachers, so what else could be expect them to say?" (p. 16)

This is glib, but it is also too simplistic.  Many scholars working in relevant fields may well be Christians (and a tiny few may even be "preachers" as he claims, though not many), but a great many are definitely not.  Leading scholars like Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey, Paula Fredriksen and Gerd Ludemann are all non-Christians.  Then there are the Jewish scholars like Mark Nanos, Alan Segal, Jacob Neusner, Hyam Maccoby and Geza Vermes.  Even those scholars who describe themselves as Christians often hold ideas about Jesus that few church-goers would recognise, let alone be comfortable with and which are nothing like the positions of people like Geivett and McDowell.  Dale C. Allison, E P Sanders and John Dominic Crossan may all regard themselves as Christians, but I doubt Josh McDowell would agree, given their highly non-orthodox ideas about the historical Jesus.


So from the start Fitzgerald sets up an artificial dichotomy, with conservative apologists defending a traditional orthodox Jesus on one hand and brave "critics who (dispute) Christian claims" who don't believe in any Jesus at all on the other.  And nothing in between.  This is nonsense, because it ignores a vast middle ground of scholars - liberal Christian, Jewish, atheist and agnostic - who definitely "dispute Christian claims" but who also conclude that there was a human, Jewish, historical First Century preacher as the point of origin for the later stories of "Jesus Christ".

A Failed Argument from Silence

The false dichotomy established in the first chapter is continued in the second, entitled "Myth No. 2: Jesus was wildly famous - but there was no reason for contemporary historians to notice him ... "   Fitzgerald insists that there are elements in the story of Jesus which should have been noticed by historians of the time and insists that there is no shortage of writers then who should have recorded some mention of them:

There were plenty writers, both Roman and Jewish, who had great interest in and much to say about (Jesus') region and its happenings .... We still have many of their writings today: volumes and volumes from scores of writers detailing humdrum events and lesser exploits of much more mundane figures in Roman Palestine, including several failed Messiahs.  (Fitzgerald, p. 22)

Now, potentially, that is a pretty solid argument.  If we did indeed have "scores of writers" from Jesus' time with such an interest in Jesus' region and who wrote about "failed Messiahs" then it would certainly be very strange that we have no contemporary mentions of Jesus.  Unfortunately, as we will see, this is one of several places where Fitzgerald lets his overblown rhetoric run well ahead of what he can then actually substantiate.

But first, his opening words in the very next sentence are worth noting.  It begins "If the Gospels were true ..."  Here and throughout the book Fitzgerald gets himself into a constant confused tangle over which Jesus he is arguing against.  He keeps saying he is arguing against the idea of any historical Jesus at all, yet at every turn it is the Jesus of a very conservative reading of the gospels that he talks about.  He repeatedly thinks that if he can show that something is not consistent with the kind of Jesus argued for by an fundamentalist apologist preacher like Josh McDowell, he has disposed of the historical Jesus altogether.  This does not follow at all.  Most critical scholars have no time for the McDowell-style Jesus either, so the Jewish preacher they present  as the historical Jesus behind the later gospel figure is left totally unscathed by Fitzgerald's naive arguments.

Thus Fitzgerald goes on to detail things in the gospels which he argues should have been noticed by writers of the time: the taxing of the whole Roman Empire, the massacre in Bethlehem by Herod the Great, Jesus' ministry generally, his miracles, his entry into Jerusalem, his trial and his execution. For anyone other than a fundamentalist, this argument has zero force.  Critical scholars, including many Christian ones, would simply chuckle at the idea that things like the story of an Empire-wide census or the Massacre of the Innocents are historical, so arguing they did not happen counts for nothing much when it comes to arguing against the existence of a historical Jesus.  Fitzgerald even seems to think that the fact the "Star of Bethlehem" and the darkness on Jesus' death are unattested and therefore most likely did not happen (which is true) is somehow a blow against the existence of a historical Jesus (which is not).

And it is hard to see why the other items on his list would be noted, noticed or even known to any far off Roman or Greek historians at all.  Given that these historians make no mention of any other Jewish peasant preachers or miracle workers, it is hard to see why Fitzgerald thinks they should have done so with this one.  As for things like his entry into Jerusalem, his trial and his crucifixion, it is equally difficult to see why they would be more than a one day wonder even locally.  Why Fitzgerald thinks such minor events would be the talk of the whole Empire is a mystery.

But in the quote above he claimed there were "scores of writers" with a burning interest in this region and, apparently, in the doings of Jewish Messianic claimants.  He even claims these writers detail the "lesser exploits" of these Messiahs, but make no mention of Jesus.  Strangely, he never tells us who these "scores of writers" with this interest in Jewish Messiahs are, which is very odd.  As it happens, we have precisely one writer who mentions any figures who might be seen as "failed Messiahs", and that is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.  But far from talking about "lesser exploits" of these figures, what this single writer says about Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants in this period makes it quite clear that Jesus was actually pretty small fry as such figures go.

For example, a bandit-rebel who declared himself a Jewish king called Athronges not only gathered enough armed followers to tackle Roman troops but for a while he was able to inflict military defeats on them, until he was defeated circa 4 BC.  An unnamed Samaritan prophet led a "great multitude"to the holy mountain of Gerizim, promising them a mystical revelation, around 36 AD.  He and his followers were so numerous they had to be attacked by the Romans and dispersed using units of both infantry and cavalry.  About ten years later a prophet called Theudas led "a great part of the people" into the desert, promising to miraculously part the River Jordan and had to be dealt with by Roman cavalry in the same way.  And another unnamed Jewish prophet, this one from Egypt, led an estimated (though unlikely) "30,000 men" to Jerusalem, telling them its walls would miraculously fall so he could lead them into the city.  Again, Roman troops had to be called out to deal with them, leaving hundreds dead and causing the prophet to run away.

It is very hard to see any of these fairly momentous events as "lesser exploits" compared to what even the gospels claim about Jesus.  Even if we take their accounts at face value, a chanting crowd greeting his entrance to Jerusalem, a trial that no-one witnessed and a run-of-the-mill execution are hardly big news compared to mass movements that required the mobilisation of troops and pitched battles.  Yet how many other historians so much as mention Athronges, the Samaritan, Theudas or the Egyptian?  None.  Apart from Josephus, no writer so much as gives them a sentence's worth of attention.  So somehow Fitzgerald thinks these minor events in the Jesus story should be mentioned when far bigger, more significant events are not.  He wildly misrepresents the evidence ("scores of writers") and his attempted argument from silence clearly fails dismally.

Next Fitzgerald goes into some detail about the writers and historians of the First Century who he claims "should" have mentioned a historical Jesus but did not.  He lists eleven who are contemporaries of Jesus.  Like many Mythers, he seems to think that the lack of any contemporary reference to Jesus is somehow a particularly telling point, since the few extra-Biblical references to Jesus are in writings dating almost a century after his time.  This would come as no surprise to anyone actually familiar with the nature of ancient source material, however.  There are few more famous ancient figures than the Carthaginian general Hannibal; even today most people at least know his name.  He was one of the greatest and justifiably famous generals of ancient times.  Yet, despite his fame then and now, we have precisely zero contemporary references to Hannibal. If we have no contemporary mentions of the man who almost destroyed the Roman Republic at the height of its power, the idea that we should expect any for an obscure peasant preacher in the backblocks of Galilee is patently absurd.

(Edit:  In the discussion in the comments on this review here and elsewhere it was brought to my attention that we do have a tiny fragment of one contemporary account of Hannibal.   P.Würzb.Inv. 1 is a papyrus fragment that seems to contain a few lines from Book IV of Sosylus' The Deeds of Hannibal.  I was not aware of this when I wrote the paragraph above, so thanks to the commenter Evan for bringing it to my attention.

The point still stands however - if we have nothing more than a few lines from any contemporary work about Hannibal to expect to have surviving contemporary mentions of someone as unimportant and obscure as Jesus is still absurd.  And there are many other very prominent people for whom we have no contemporary mentions: we have nothing of the sort for the Icenian warrior queen Boudicca or the Germanic warlord Arminius, for example.  Arminius destroyed one tenth of the whole Roman army in one battle and led the only successful rebellion against the Empire in its history, yet we have nothing about him from the time or even from his lifetime.  Fitzgerald's emphasis on the lack of contemporary references to a peasant who did not much is plainly ridiculous.  Of course, it should also be noted that my point is still correct - the text of P.Würzb.Inv. 1  makes no mention of any "Hannibal". ) 

Fitzgerald labours mightily to detail all the writers who he claims "should" have mentioned Jesus.  But in every case his argument suffers from the same fatal flaw: given that none of these writers mention any other Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants, there is absolutely no reason to think they "should" have mentioned Jesus.  As noted above, Athronges, the Sarmatian, Theudas and the Egyptian prophet were actually far more prominent and significant locally than Jesus was even according to the most naive, face value fundamentalist's reading of the gospels.  Yet not one of them is mentioned by any of Fitzgerald's list of "should" writers either.  Nor are any other comparable Jewish figures of the time, such as Hillel, Shammai, Choni HaMa'agel, John the Baptist or Gamaliel.

Yet Fitzgerald again claims that these writers do mention other figures similar to Jesus.  "In many cases", he claims,  "these same writers have much to say about other much less interesting messiahs - but not Jesus" (p.42)  In "many cases"?  In which cases?  Fitzgerald simply does not say.  And other messiahs are mentioned?  Which ones, where and by who?  Again, despite this being a key point that should potentially back up and substantiate his creaking argument, he never bothers to tell the reader.  The reason is simple - what Fitzgerald is saying here is absolute nonsense.  None of his writers mention any such figures for the same reason they do not mention Jesus: because these writers had no interest in any such Jewish preachers and prophets.  As a result, despite all his bold claims and loud rhetoric, Fitzgerald's argument collapses in a heap.

Josephus and his Amazing Technicolour Interpolations

Despite Fitzgerald's unsubstantiated claims to the contrary, the only writer of the period who seems to have had any interest at all in people like Jesus was Yosef ben Matityahu or Flavius Josephus.  This means that if Josephus did not mention Jesus while mentioning other such figures like Theudas and John the Baptist, people like Fitzgerald would actually be able to make a real argument from silence.   The problem is that Josephus does mention Jesus - twice.  So any Myther book or article has to spill a lot of ink trying to explain these highly inconvenient  mentions away.

Getting rid of the first reference to Jesus, the one in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII.3.4  is made a little easier by the fact that at least some of it is not original to Josephus and was added by Christian scribes later.  The textus receptus of the passage has Josephus saying things about Jesus that no Jewish non-Christian would say, such as "He was the Messiah" and "he appeared to them alive on the third day".  So, not surprisingly, Fitzgerald takes the usual Myther tack and rejects the whole passage as a later addition and rejects the idea that Josephus mentioned Jesus here at all.

He does acknowledge the alternative idea, that Josephus' mention of Jesus was simply added to, but yet again he attributes this to "wishful apologists".  This is a total distortion of the state of academic play on the question of this passage.  As several surveys of the academic literature have shown, the majority of scholars now accept that there was an original mention of Jesus in  Antiquities XVIII.3.4 and this includes the majority of Jewish and non-Christian scholars, not merely "wishful apologists".  This is partly because once the more obvious interpolated phrases are removed, the passage reads precisely like what Josephus would be expected to write and also uses characteristic language found elsewhere in his works.  But it is also because of the 1970 discovery of what seems to be a pre-interpolation version of Josephus' passage, uncovered by Jewish scholar Schlomo Pines of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Professor Pines found an Arabic paraphrase of the Tenth Century historian Agapius which quotes Josephus' passage, but not in the form we have it today.  This version, which seems to draw on a copy of Josephus' original, uninterpolated text, says that Jesus was believed by his followers to have been the Messiah and to have risen from the dead, which means in the original Josephus was simply reporting early Christian beliefs about Jesus regarding his supposed status and resurrection.  This is backed further by a Syriac version cited by Michael the Syrian which also has the passage saying "he was believed to be the Messiah".  The evidence now stacks up heavily on the side of the partial authenticity of the passage, meaning there is a reference to Jesus as a historical person in precisely the writer we would expect to mention him.  So how does Fitzgerald deal with the Arabic and Syriac evidence?  Well, he doesn't.  He is either ignorant of it or he conveniently ignores it.

Not content with ignoring inconvenient key counter-evidence, Fitzgerald is also happy to simply make things up.  He talks about how the Second Century Christian apologist Origen does not mention the Antiquities XVII.3.4 reference to Jesus (which is true, but not surprising) and then claims "Origen even quotes from Antiquities of the Jews in order to prove the historical existence of John the Baptist, then adds that Josephus didn't believe in Jesus, and criticises him for failing to mention Jesus in that book!" (p. 53)  Which might sound like a good argument to anyone who does not bother to check self-published authors' citations.  But those who do will turn to Origen's Contra Celsum I.4 and find the following:

Now this writer [Josephus], although not believing in Jesus as the Messiah, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless-being, although against his will, not far from the truth-that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was  "the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah",--the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.

So Origen does not say Josephus "didn't believe in Jesus", just that he did not believe Jesus was the Messiah (which supports the Arabic and Syriac evidence on the pre-interpolation version of Antiquities XVII.3.4) And far from criticising Josephus "for failing to mention Jesus in that book", Origen actually quotes Josephus directly doing exactly that - the phrase "αδελφος Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου" (the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah") is word for word the phrase used by Josephus in his other mention of Jesus, found at Antiquities XX.9.1.  And he does not refer to and quote Josephus mentioning Jesus just in Contra Celsum I.4, but he also does so twice more: in Contra Celsum II:13 and in Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei X.17.  It is hard to say if this nonsense claim of Fitzgerald's is mere incompetence or simply a lie.  I will be charitable and put it down to another of this amateur's bungles.

 Jesus, James and History

So Fitzgerald then turns to this second mention of Jesus by Josephus, the one that is actually mentioned and quoted by Origen as noted above, and attempts to make it disappear as well.  Except the mention in Antiquities XX.9.1 is much trickier prospect for Myther theorists than the clearly edited mention in Antiquities XVII.3.4.  The second mention is made in passing in a passage where Josephus is detailing an event of some significance and one which he, as a young man, would have witnessed himself.

In 62 AD, the 26 year old Josephus was in Jerusalem, having recently returned from an embassy to Rome.  He was a young member of the aristocratic priestly elite which ruled Jerusalem and were effectively rulers of Judea, though with close Roman oversight and only with the backing of the Roman procurator in Caesarea.  But in this year the procurator Porcius Festus died while in office and his replacement, Lucceius Albinus, was still on his way to Judea from Rome.  This left the High Priest, Hanan ben Hanan (usually called Ananus), with a freer rein that usual.  Ananus executed some Jews without Roman permission and, when this was brought to the attention of the Romans, Ananus was deposed.

This was a momentous event and one that the young Josephus, as a member of the same elite as the High Priest, would have remembered well.  But what is significant is what he says in passing about the executions that that triggered the deposition of the High Priest:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so (the High Priest) assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Messiah, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

 This second reference to Jesus is difficult for Mythers to deal with.  Dismissing it as another interpolation does not work, since a Christian interpolator in a later century is hardly going to invent something as significant as the deposition of the High Priest just to slip in this passing reference to Jesus which, unlike the interpolated elements in the Antiquities XVII.3.4 passage, makes no Christian claims about Jesus.  Then there are the three citations and quotations of this passage by Origen mentioned above.  Fitzgerald seems totally oblivious to these, but Origen was writing in the mid-Third Century AD, which shows this mention existed in Josephus then - ie while Christianity was still a small, illegal and persecuted sect and so much too early for any Christian doctoring of this text.

But Fitzgerald falls back on one of the several gambits Mythers use to get their argument off this awkward and pointy hook.  He notes that Josephus tells us the successor of the deposed High Priest was one "Jesus, son of Damneus" and then triumphantly concludes that the "Jesus, who was called Messiah" is not a reference to Jesus of Nazareth at all, but actually a reference to this "Jesus, son of Damneus" instead.

While he declares this ingenious solution to his problem to be "the only (explanation) that makes sense" (p. 61), it is actually highly flawed.  He claims, following fellow Myther Richard Carrier, that the words "who was called Messiah" were "tacked on" and that the Jesus mentioned as the brother of the executed James was this "Jesus, son of Damneus".  But this does not explain why Josephus would identify one son (James) by reference to his brother and the other (Jesus) by reference to their father.  Josephus does this nowhere else in his works.  It also does not explain why when he does say "Jesus, son of Damneus" was made High Priest, he does not mention that this was the unidentified "Jesus" mentioned earlier and that the executed James was his brother, since that relevant detail would be worth noting.

More importantly, neither Carrier nor Fitzgerald explain why an interpolator would "tack on" this reference to their Jesus. The motive behind the clumsy interpolations in Antiquities XVII.3.4 is clear: the idea that Jesus was the Messiah and that he rose from the dead was disputed by non-Christians, especially by Jews, so to have the Jewish historian Josephus apparently attest to these Christian claims turned this passage that simply mentions Jesus into a powerful rhetorical tool in defence of these Christian claims.  But simply adding "who was called Messiah" to this other text supports no Christian claim at all.  If anyone prior to the Nineteenth Century was arguing Jesus did not exist, then it would make sense that such an interpolation might be needed, but that is a purely modern phenomenon.  So Fitzgerald's contrived argument is not only clumsy, it is also supposing something for which there was no motive at all.  Then, yet again, there is the fact that Origen quotes this passage three separate times with the "who was called Messiah" element in it.  This was in the mid-Third Century and long before Christians were in any position to be "tacking on" anything to copies of Josephus.

"Jesus" or Yeshua was one of the most common names for Jewish men of the time.  Josephus was very careful to differentiate between different individuals with the same common first names, especially where he mentions two in the same passage.  So it is far more likely that he calls one Jesus "who was called Messiah" and the other "son of Damneus" for precisely this reason.  The clumsy idea that Fitzgerald proposes is highly awkward in all respects; except, of course, as an ad hoc way of making a clear reference to Jesus go away and leave his thesis intact.

Irrelevance (with howlers)

The next four chapters in Fitzgerald's book are more examples of the author arguing against a fundamentalist version of Jesus rather than the historical Jewish preacher of critical non-Christian and liberal scholars.  In them he marshals some fairly standard arguments that would be news to absolutely no-one except the most clueless of Biblical literalists or naive traditional Christians.  He presents evidence that the gospels were not written by eye-witnesses, that they differ in their depictions of Jesus and that there are some historical and archaeological problems with taking them at face value.  Yet again, Fitzgerald cannot seem to make up his mind if he is arguing against any historical Jesus at all or merely a traditionalist/fundamentalist version of him based on a face value reading of the Bible.  These chapters are run of the mill stuff arguing against things that even many Christians do not believe and they do little or nothing to advance his argument about the existence of a historical Jesus.  The gospels can indeed have been written by non-eye witnesses, can present wildly varying pictures of Jesus and can be riddled with historical and archaeological errors and a historical Jewish preacher could still have been the origin of the later stories.  Much of this part of the book feels like mere padding.

Though there are some howlers in it that, yet again, shows that Fitzgerald is an amateur who really needed an informed editor.  At one point he writes:

Matthew has Jesus making a pun where he tells Peter  "upon this rock I will build my church" (Matt. 16:18).  Though if this had happened in reality, Peter would have scratched his head and asked,  "Say Jesus - what's a church?" since churches hadn't been invented yet, and wouldn't be developed until many decades later. (p. 70)

The word translated as "church" in most English editions is ἐκκλησίαν and it simply means "assembly, gathering, all of a given group", so it would be very odd for Peter to have "scratched his head" at what would have been a perfectly sensible and clear statement.  Personally, I do not happen to believe Jesus said this at all and it seems this was something put in his mouth later by the writer of Matthew.  But the naivete of Fitzgerald's English-based argument is indicative of his weak grasp of the material.

His comments elsewhere in these largely irrelevant chapters are similarly naive.  He pauses in his brief chapter on archaeology and, in a weak attempt to make this chapter vaguely relevant to his main argument, writes:

At the risk of being redundant, we should remember that there has never been a trace of physical archaeological evidence for Jesus, despite centuries of infamous hoaxes such as the Shroud of Turin (p. 108)

Again, that the faithful have clung to pious hoaxes and that the gullible still fall for fake artefacts is not remotely relevant to Fitzgerald's thesis.  And "there has never been a trace of physical archaeological evidence" for most people who have existed in human history, particularly if they were poor and lived in a backwater.  For Fitzgerald to think that the lack of any such evidence for Jesus tells us something about whether he existed or not makes him about as clueless as the Shroud believers.

 

The Jesus of Paul

The epistles of Paul pose another problem for Mythers like Fitzgerald.  Given that they are the earliest Christian documents we have, generally thought to have been written in the 50s AD, they are uncomfortably close to Jesus' lifetime for the Mythers and remarkably close as ancient source material goes.  So the Mythers take solace in the fact that Paul does not actually say much about Jesus' life and preaching.  They exaggerate this completely, claiming that Paul has nothing to say about any earthly Jesus:

Paul never talks about Jesus' death as though it actually happened to a real man from Galilee who lived on earth a few years before.  Nor does hie give any details about the events of Jesus' life: not the places he travelled, not the miracles he performed, not the parables he told, not even the teachings or instructions he gave .... Paul never says anything about Jesus being an earthly teacher at all. (pp. 128-29)

This is, in fact, substantially nonsense.  While Paul's main focus in his letters is answering questions on issues about his preaching of Jesus as a risen Messiah, he actually does talk about Jesus' earthly life and career at many points.  He says he was born as a human, of a human mother and born a Jew (Galatians4:4).  He repeats that he had a "human nature" and that he was a human descendant of King David (Romans1:3).  Contrary to Fitzgerald's claim, he refers to teachings Jesus made during his earthly ministry on divorce (1Cor. 7:10), on preachers (1Cor. 9:14) and on the coming apocalypse (1Thess. 4:15).  He mentions how he was executed by earthly rulers (1Cor. 2:8) and that he died and was buried (1Cor 15:3-4).  And he says he had a earthly, physical brother called James who Paul himself had met (Galatians1:19).  

Naturally, the Myther theorists that Fitzgerald is following with this idea that Paul believed in a purely heavenly, mystical Jesus have contrived ways to argue away these clear references to an earthly Jesus, but they require contortions, strained readings of the texts, suppositions and, inevitably, assumed interpolations for them to work.  Fitzgerald makes a great deal out of the fact that a lot of the gospels' details are not found in Paul.  This is partly because of Paul's theological focus on the risen Jesus, partly because of the incidental nature of the letters he was writing and the concerns they were addressing and partly because some of those gospel elements  (eg the infancy narratives) are almost certainly are not historical and probably had yet to develop.  But to pretend that Paul did not believe in an earthly Jesus at all requires some contorted hoop jumping of a most dubious and unconvincing nature.

The reference to Paul's meeting with "James, the brother of the Lord" is one that gives the proponents of this idea that Paul only believed in a heavenly, mystical Jesus the most grief.  In Galatians 1, Paul is clearly trying to fend off the charge that he is somehow subordinate to those who were followers of Jesus before Paul's conversion.  In his attempt to counter claims to this effect, he assures the assembly in Galatia that he did not get his "gospel" from the community in Jerusalem.  Though he cannot deny that he did go to Jerusalem after his conversion and did meet Peter, so he quickly adds "I saw none of the other apostles - only James, the brother of the Lord."

There is a consistent tradition that Jesus had a brother called James and that this James became a leader in the Jesus Sect community in Jerusalem.  As we have seen, Josephus mentions the execution of this same James, "brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah".  So we have a confluence of evidence, both Christian and non-Christian, that Jesus had a brother called James who was a leader in Jerusalem and here we have Paul mentioning, in passing, meeting this very same James.  This poses a thorny problem for the Mythers.

There are a variety of ingenious ways used by them to extract themselves from this awkward pickle, usually by claiming that "brother of the Lord" was not meant literally and that there was an (otherwise totally unattested) sub-group of Christian believers who were called "the brothers of the Lord".  Fitzgerald does not resort to this hopelessly ad hoc piece of supposition, but instead falls back on the old Myther standby: supposing a textual interpolation:

Though Christians seize on the one and only verse (Gal. 1:19) that has Paul refer to James in passing as "the Brother of the Lord" it seems more likely that this was a marginal note inserted by a later scribe, whether by accident or deliberately. (p. 145)

He supports this bold claim by noting that "just a few verses later (Paul) disdainfully dismiss(es) James as though he was a nobody (Gal. 2:6)".  What Paul does in Galatians 2:6 is talk about some people who he describes as "those who were held in high esteem" (ie the Jerusalem assembly generally) and says "they added nothing to my message".  But he goes on to note "On the contrary, they recognized that I had been entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised."  He then talks about how this mission to the gentiles was given to him by "James, Cephas (Peter) and John, those esteemed as pillars" and holds this up as a ringing endorsement of his authority. How Fitzgerald reads that as disdainfully dismissing James "as though he was a nobody" is a mystery.  And how he could use this to posit an interpolation simply as a way of getting rid of an inconvenient piece of evidence and prop up his thesis even more so.   

It is this kind of weak, supposition-laden argument, made up of ad hoc contrivances based on little more than wishful thinking that leaves the Myther position wide open to a savage application of Occam's Razor.  An academic editor would simply laugh at any manuscript that contained an argument this weak on such a key point.  But one of the joys of self-publishing is that you don't have to convince or impress anyone but yourself.  Fitzgerald, it seems, is very impressed with Fitzgerald's arguments.  Not surprisingly.

In Conclusion

I have gone to the effort to write a long review of this book not because it is a worthy work - it most certainly is not.  It is not even the best that the Mythers can do: there are other books which may be flawed but are nowhere near as weak, clumsy, confused or amateurish as this one (as much as I disagree with him, at least Earl Doherty's thesis is coherent and well-researched).  I have chosen to go into some detail with this one because it strikes me as encapsulating most of what is hopelessly wrong about the Myther thesis and its manifestations online and in self-published books like this one.  Like most pseudo history, these arguments for the non-existence of Jesus are flawed by the fact their writers begin with their conclusion.  That is bad enough to start with, and there is no shortage of amateur hobbyist theorists who are too enamoured of their "amazing idea" to subject it to sufficient comprehensive self-criticism.  But this is exacerbated in the Mythers' case by an ideologically-driven bias.

A major part of the problem with most manifestations of the Myther thesis is that its proponents desperately want it to be true because they want to undermine Christianity.  And any historical analysis done with one eye on an emotionally-charged ideological agenda is usually heading for trouble from the start.  Over and over again, Fitzgerald does what most of these Mythers do - plumps for an interpretation, explanation or excuse about the evidence simply because it preserves his thesis.  Their biases against Christianity blind Mythers to the fact that they are not arriving at conclusions because they are the best or most parsimonious explanation of the evidence, but merely because they fit their agenda.

The overwhelming majority of scholars, Christian, non-Christian, atheist, agnostic or Jewish, accept there was a Jewish preacher as the point of origin for the Jesus story simply because that makes the most sense of all the evidence.  The contorted and contrived lengths that Fitzgerald and his ilk have to resort to shows exactly how hard it is to sustain the idea that no such historical preacher existed.  Personally, as an atheist amateur historian myself, I would have no problem at all embracing the idea that no historical Jesus existed if someone could come up with an argument for this that did not depend at every turn on strained readings, ad hoc explanations, imagined textual interpolations and fanciful suppositions.  While the Myther thesis is being sustained by junk pulp pseudo scholarship like Fitzgerald's worthless little book, it will remain a curiosity on the fringes of scholarship good for little more than amusement.  This book is crap.


(Note: Any Mythers who think I need to be educated on their thesis in the comments section, don't bother.  I've been debating you guys online for nearly ten years now and I'm more than familiar with all the counter arguments and alternative readings and other contrivances you people use and so don't need the comments below to be cluttered up by them.  Likewise, sneering comments or commentary by Mythers who I've bugged in online debates over the years will also be deleted.  If you don't like that, then go whine on your own blogs.  Have a lovely day.)

Edit (01.12.13):  In January last year David Fitzgerald posted a lengthy response to my review.  Since then some have asked me if I was going to reply to him.  My reply has taken some time, since it is over 12,000 words long, but it has now been posted on Armarium Magnum:

"The Jesus Myth Theory: A Response to David Fitzgerald"