Peter Costello
Looking at the Middle East as “the cradle of Christianity”
The expulsion of the Christian communities from Mosul has shocked a large part of the world – largely the Western world, of course, as it would be hard for some other Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, who themselves restrict the usages of Christians, to protest about what these jihadists, who owe their beliefs to the Wahabi sect of Islam in Saudi Arabia, are doing.
Many commentators have seen these communities as descended from the earliest of all Christian communities, and this is certainly true. Here there have been Christians for nigh on two thousand years. The Middle East is certainly the "cradle of Christianity".
But Mesopotamia in the very heart of the Middle East is far more than that ñ it may well be the birth place of monotheism, of the religious tradition to which Christianity, Judaism and Islam all belong.
I was reminded of this in rereading Irving Finkel's The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood (Hodder & Stoughton, Ä32.00 / £25.00) which was reviewed in these pages a little while ago. The main theme of this most interesting book is the development the story of Noah and the Ark as we have it in the Bible, and its direct source in the traditions of earlier cultures of Sumner and Akkadia.
Creative
Finkel suggests that it was during the so-called "Jewish captivity" in Babylon after 605 BC, after the destruction of the first Temple, that Judaism began to develop into the religion we now know. Usually seen as a period of intolerable slavery, and lamented as such in Jewish tradition, it was in fact he suggests a very creative period for religion.
The process of putting together the Bible as we have it began there. The Jews had brought with them many historical texts – many of them are alluded to in the Bible itself ñ texts which have not survived to this day however.
What they lacked it seems was any account of the Creation of the World and the earliest relations of their God with the world.
These lacunae they made good from the texts which the new generation of clever Jewish schoolboys read in their Babylonian school texts. Such texts summarising the ancient stories of Mesopotamia have been found. The texts were seen not as untrue but as a record of history, and adopted as such. This accounts for many of the elements in Genesis which have no relation at all to the way of life in Palestine ñ the idea of paradise as a form of hunting park such as all the kings of Mesopotamia had.
But there was a crucial world changing difference between what the Jews were creating and the elements they were creating from.
They created the idea, not a set of mere myths, but a set of scriptures, of fixed writings. The Jews became in Babylon what they had not been before, "the People of the Book". They gave to the idea of man's relations with God a beginning and a continuation, and a looming sense of conclusion. The beginning of time implied, at least for the writers and editors of Genesis, the end of time.
This invention, if we can call it that, was an inspired one. It profoundly affected the course of history ñ indeed the idea that history does have a course, one that ends in a final judgement ñ came into being.
It was in Mesopotamia that the transcendent idea of a single God came to be refined and to be understood as it had not perhaps been in earlier centuries. One God, one Scripture, one People of God. This conception to which all the monotheistic faiths still adhere is Mesopotamiaís great gift to the world.
So Mesopotamia is not just the cradle of Christianity; it is the cradle of the very idea of religion as we know it. What it shared in common between Islam, Judaism and Christianity can be made the basis of a wider and tolerant understanding. And it is this that makes the dreadful events at Mosul and elsewhere so terribly appalling. The intolerance of ISIS serves not to purify religion as they hope, but to destroy it.
