How Jesus won the lottery

If “And Man Created God” occasionally boggles the souls of believers, at least they’re not alone in their confusion. Selina O’Grady lays on the historical facts so thickly and then blankets them in so many marginal (and marginally relevant) anecdotes that even atheists, accustomed to religious riddles, must also struggle through the maze.

This is an otherwise quite commendable survey of the monarchs, emperors and religious faiths around the time that Jesus walked the earth. Jesus is certainly not elevated above any other holy man in the Old World spanning from Spain to China – in fact O’Grady maintains a cynical view of religion, as reflected in the book’s title, though she entertains without prejudice the usual rationales for its existence.

Her mission is to try and explain why Christianity, of all the promising faiths of the era, came to be the one adopted in the Roman Empire, thus ensuring its longevity and universal reach. It was, after all, just a quirky and not especially popular apocalyptic sect in Judaea, and Rome enjoyed a slew of gods from which to choose, both foreign and home-grown, once monotheism became politically preferable.

The answer, O’Grady concludes, lies entirely with Saint Paul, the Turkish Jew who so wholeheartedly embraced and then reinterpreted the tenets of “the Jesus cult” that he alarmed Jesus’ steadfastly Jewish apostles. The author repeatedly characterises him as a marketing genius who re-branded a localised folk religion – regarded with grave suspicion by Judea’s Roman overlords – as the empire-friendly Christianity that could accommodate anyone and anything.

At face value it’s a convincing argument, but O’Grady might have become muddled in her own maze. Touring the world of the first century, she has a good look at Rome’s own imperial cult and the cult of Isis it adopted from Egypt, at Stoicism, Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism and Confucianism, plus all manner of offshoots and off-the-wall mystery rituals.

She points out the pluses and minuses of each one in terms of its possibility utility to a Roman Empire in decline. Then she decides that only Christianity really fit the bill when it came time to abandon the deities of Olympus to their Greek fate and pick a single god who could unite the empire’s diverse population. (Christianity did no such thing, of course, as she acknowledges, but that was Rome’s hope.)

Yet O’Grady has shown throughout that several of these alternative religions could have filled the bill for Rome – and then cannot fully explain why they didn’t, instead resting her case on the commercial wizardry of Saint Paul. It’s a belief as tenuous as faith itself.

This is nevertheless a book from which you can learn a great deal, particularly in regard to religion and state power and their never-ending ballet, usually danced to the tune of commercial trade. The distinction is fascinating, as O’Grady explains it, between the Pharisees offering a more accessible Yahweh in every home and the Sadducees who wanted to keep him remote, thus safeguarding their hereditary priesthood. The sneaky manner in which Rome’s rulers crept their way to godhood is amusing (politicians have always been thus). Even more intriguing is the rise and demise of Buddhism in India, where the majority ultimately opted to stay with the “comfortable” Brahmin caste system after all, even as the rest of Asia heeded the Buddha’s teachings on equality (or at least promised to).

I did not know that Saint Paul and many of his well-heeled followers kept slaves, reasoning that every man is a servant, at least to God, and, anyway, someone had to do the dishes. If that was the slave’s lot in life, he could take comfort in knowing Heaven would be his reward. You can see why the Roman emperors warmed to Christian docility.

The great shortcoming of “And Man Created God”, however, is its endless asides. Evidently O’Grady, who makes documentaries for British television, chose the same approach here: fill the scene with interesting visual details to hold the reader’s attention. The strategy doesn’t work, though, when there’s so much ground to cover in less than 400 pages. 

The author’s lyrical flourishes and gouts of gossipy dross fatten but also flatten the story of Chinese Emperor Wang Mang, who convinced the populace that he ruled as “the Son of Heaven”. A visit to the vanished kingdom of Meroe in what is now southern Egypt could have done without a glimpse of the “monumentally fat queen’s pendulous breast”. And what does Emperor Tiberius barring men from kissing each other on the mouth because of a herpes epidemic have to do with comparative religion?

Meanwhile the most interesting figure in the book has wandered off over the horizon, never to be seen again. O’Grady points out that precious little is known about the holy man Apollonius of Tyana and then proceeds to tantalise the reader by showing how very much like Jesus he was.

A roaming preacher who spoke of a universal, loving spiritual father above, Apollonius supposedly could revive the dead and perform other miracles. He was more famous than Jesus and widely referred to as “the son of God”. As late as the fourth century, people were still arguing about which of these men was holier. 

So why don’t people worship Apollonius today? “Maybe Apollonius did not have the right message,” O’Grady writes, and leaves it at that, ushering him quickly to the east so she can examine the Parthian Empire that would evolve into Persia.

 

 

And Man Created God: Kings, Cults and Conquests at the Time of Jesus

By Selina O’Grady

Published by Atlantic, 2013

Available at Asia Books, Bt495

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey