I love history, for me, it helps me understand why we are where we are today. As the Modest Mouse song goes, History Sticks to your Feet.
Today’s exploration is about our conception of history and what we can prove actually happened. I’m going to talk about only two people, but, they were two people who’ve had a bit of an impact on the world.
The first is Alexander the Great. From a historical perspective, this dude is something else. It’s impossible to understate his accomplishments.
Oddly, we’re going to start with his horse. According to the legend, as a sixteen-year-old, Alexander tamed a wild horse that even grown men could not tame. The horse was a colt, and grew up with the young prince. Whether or not the story of him taming the wild colt is true, what is true is, he rode that horse into battle his whole life. There are statues of the horse. That horse, tamed from wild or not, was real. People have written stories and built statues of Alexander that also memorialize THAT HORSE.
Alexander led armies and defeated kingdoms and empires at a time when that just didn’t happen. Pre-Hellenistic Greece and Bronze age civilizations warred, but, no one really had the strength to conquer an entire other empire before. Nobody really thought it was possible.
It was made possible by the purest form of narcissism in recorded history. A man who, believed he was a god and was effectively rewarded for this belief for most of his whole life. Even his own dad said something along the lines of “Wow! Look at the ego on my kid here! I bet he takes over the world!” Which he did. And named every single city along the way after himself. Because that’s what narcissists do. For a while though, a lot of other people thought he was a god too.
The next dude, according to contemporary sources, did not think of himself as a god. This one is tricky because there is a whole lot fewer reliable accounts of Joshua of Nazareth.
This is what we do know about the man who became known as the Cristos: He was Jewish. He had a following. He spoke of being non-violent. That following believed he was the “King” or the next coming of David and he was there to reclaim the land of Israel.
Reclaimed because the series of events caused some one hundred years earlier by Alexander, had led to the occupation of Israel by Roman forces.
This is where history becomes hard to sieve through. See, the final thing we do know about Joshua of Nazareth is that he was crucified. The bible will tell you that the Romans had Jesus crucified for blasphemy, and that the Jewish elders were involved. This is patently false because crucifixion isn’t the punishment for blasphemy, stoning was. Crucifixion is punishment for sedition because it sends such a visceral message to everyone. Romans crucified intentionally to impose fear in their provinces. The kind of fear they would specifically want to use on the followers who call someone a king in a territory they forcefully controlled. Well documented figures like Pontious Pilot were especially brutal. Of note here, Pilot wrote home to Rome, a lot, and never mentioned Joshua of Nazareth nor a Cristos.
Oddly though, the bible doesn’t mention the Romans a whole lot. This is because of two major reasons. The first is because is centuries later, the Romans would get the opportunity to edit all the texts, this is a nice feature of dominance. The second reason though, and the real reason why Joshua of Nazereth doesn’t really resemble Jesus Christ, is because of Saul of Tarsus.
Saul of Tarsus, AKA Paul the Persecutor, AKA the greatest PR man in history, was a Jew who held Roman citizenship and converted for reasons that will, wonderfully, never be truly understood. From co-opting the Isis fable to the spread of non-kosher beliefs intended to welcome gentiles, Saul enabled a Jewish non-violent freedom movement to spread. It worked well enough to get him arrested by Roman officials, but, because of his citizenship, he could ask for an audience with the emperor. He died in jail waiting. His letters, his writing is the basis for the gospels, and, effectively what we believe in as Christianity.
Here’s the thing though. Saul never actually met Jesus. Meaning more first-hand accounts of Alexanders Horse exists than of either the carpenter Joshua of Nazareth or the son of god Jesus Christ. So, while it’s hard to believe it’s more likely as a child Alex tamed a wild horse than Jesus Christ told a sermon on the mount.
Just like the horse though, Josh doesn’t have a lot to do with the shaping of our image of God. That was mostly done by the Romans. You know. The people who nailed him to a tree. Which is a good metaphor, Josh had a great idea in non-violence. Then some violent people took it, and used it to control a bunch of other people to convince them to be mostly peaceful.
It took a while, but I think Josh won, in the long run. Here we are, in a world where a war has just broken out, and almost all rational people are horrified. Alexander, and certainly the Romans didn’t believe those things in their time, but their decedents and the world the profoudnly influenced certainly seem to have.