ALPHA AND OMEGA | 2005-05-11
Someone just asked me where my ideas come from.
Another person told me something that I think gets to the truth about where my ideas come from:
"Bob, things that other people don't even notice leap out at you."
An example of this is Jesus's words, "I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end." Alpha and omega are NOT Hebrew letters. They are not Aramaic letters. They are Greek letters, and everyone who was listening knew exactly what Jesus was talking about.
When Jesus spoke privately with Pontius Pilate, what language do think they were speaking IN? The question never occurred to me until I started thinking about "the alpha and the omega." Greek was the language of the Eastern Roman Empire. Greek was also the language in which the Roman nobility spoke to each other in Rome.
They spoke Greek, of course.
Jesus kept quoting the Septuagint, the Jewish scriptures in Greek. When Saint John wrote Revelations, and pronounced a curse on anyone who added or subtracted from them, he wrote in GREEK.
Luther and Calvin assumed that only Hebrew scriptures before Christ were Biblical. So they chopped out a huge part of the Catholic Bible that was in Greek. In fact, they cut out all of the Bible from the centuries before Jesus. Jesus Himself would not recognize the Bible I was raised with.
Catholics still keep these Greek books, as the Apocrypha, but they do not study it much. They almost never quote it.
But when Revelations was written in the first century, the New Testament had not yet been compiled. Each of the Gospels, including the many that were thrown out when the New Testament was officially complied, was THE New Testament for a large number of Christians. All they had as scripture was the Bible St. John spoke of in Revelations, and all of the last part of it was the Greek writings we no longer pay attention to.
So the last words of our Bible are a curse on anyone who would remove any part of the Bible, and it was written in Greek.
I am not a Bible literalist, so this makes little difference to me. For Bible literalists, this makes no difference at all.
So where exactly did Greek culture fit into the whole mosaic of Christian history? There were seven million Jews in the Roman Empire when Jesus was born, over ten percent of the total population. As Christianity advanced, these Hellenist Jews, like the historian Josephus, disappear from history quietly and entirely.
They became the basis of the Christian Church.
So most Roman Jews DID accept Christ, but they are the very Jews Christian theologians today reject. Both today's Jews and today's Christians do not see them as real Jews because their language was Greek, not Hebrew.
Looking deeply into this would not so much change theology, which is not my field. But it would change history, which IS my field. I want to know what political influence those millions of Jews had in the time of Christ that allowed them to be the only people exempted from the rite of emperor-worship.
I would like to know what how five million people, as they became Christian, began to make their alliances and throw their weight behind the increasingly vicious struggles for imperial power. In the third century, Roman emperors ruled for months at a time before being killed. There was something desperate going on.
And when Constantine accepted Christianity, was it a religious decision or a political one?
All from thinking about "the alpha and the omega," I realize that there is a giant void in Roman political history without which the history we have is pure myth.