The Roots of Christianity II

In a narrow strip of the ancient Near East, bordered roughly by the hills of Judea on the west and the Jordan River on the east, there dwelt a xenophobic and odd people. They claimed descent from a single man named Abram, or Abraham, originally from the city of Ur in Mesopotamia, where his father was an idol maker. Apparently Abraham was a young man prone to thought for, according to the oral traditions of his descendants, one day while his father napped he conducted and experiment. He crept into his father's workshop and smashed all the idols except the biggest. He laid the hammer by the large idol. When his father returned to work after his rest, Abraham blamed the carnage on the surviving idol. His father admonished Abraham not be foolish, and punished him for the mayhem. This confirmed a suspicion which he had long harbored that no one, not even those who stood the most to profit from their purported powers, really believed in the power of these gods. Yet Abraham felt, as all men do at one point or another, that the world and its wonders called for a deity. Shortly after this, at the tender age of seventy-five, Abraham packed up his family and left Ur, and the rest, as they say, is history.


That history, the history of the nation eventually called Israel and its attendant religion, known as Judaism (the two can never really be separated) is a story of triumph and tragedy, it is a story of apostasy and repentance. I don't intend to recount the saga of Israel here. Most people are at least vaguely familiar with the tale, and accounts of it are readily available in the Hebrew Scriptures.

In my last essay, I surmised that monotheism had been the original theological state of mankind. Here I will put forth the premise that Abraham rediscovered that theology. How this idea entered into Abraham's mind, I have no idea. Perhaps there were tales surviving to his day recounting such a belief. Perhaps he had some sort of epiphany. In any event, it seems that the idea of one deity, of one God, was not a commonly held belief in his day. This God then deigns to establish a covenant, or relationship, with Abraham and his descendants.

His descendants would cling to this monotheistic ideal for the better part of two thousand years, imperfectly, sometimes straying into apostasy, but always the faithful remnant remained, always returning to their devotion to the "God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob". For two thousand years, they prepared the way for, and eagerly awaited that which all religions, at their base, hoped for, the reconciliation of man and God. The law of God, handed down to the people through Moses, set the Jews apart from their contemporaries. The Jews were not xenophobic. They were set apart by God to prevent their corruption. The plan of God was to present the world with its savior through the Jews. Their task was to maintain the purity of Man as best they could, to foster a culture capable of nurturing a Man become God. Their prophets foretold that event; their teachings foretold His; their sacrifices foreshadowed the sacrifice that God would make out His love for His Creation.

And so it happened that, in the fullness of time, God saved His people. Next time, I think, perhaps we'll examine Judaism realized. Until then, all the best. Joe