Why I Write This Blog

When in the 16th-century the philosopher Giordano Bruno suggested that space is infinite, and that each star is a sun like our own with its own worlds circling around it, these shocking speculations were added to the charges of heresy which the Church brought against him. To obliterate these outrageous heresies from the world Bruno was [1]incarcerated by the Inquisition and periodically tortured for eight years before being burned at the stake in Rome, after which his ashes were swept up and dumped in the Tiber. But ideas endure, and heresies have a way of casting shadows of doubt across the comfortable worlds which we create for ourselves. This weblog is about those shadows.

The bronze statue of Giordano Bruno which stands close to the site of his execution in Rome. An enlightened free thinker centuries ahead of his time, Bruno’s daring ideas have long been vindicated by our own contemporary science. But as recently as 2000 the Papal office refused to sign an edict that would have pardoned Bruno, considering his ideas ‘too extreme to be forgiven by the Church’. The charges against Bruno stand to this day.

But this begs the question: what are heresies? In the 13th-century Pope Clement III branded the Christian Cathars in the south of France as ‘the enemies of Christ’, and their beliefs as ‘heretical’. But the firestorm of violence which he then unleashed against the [2]Cathars, and the mass genocides, burnings and tortures which resulted in the virtual extinction of the Cathars and their beliefs not only had nothing whatever to do with the teachings of Christ, they were the antithesis of all which those Christian teachings stood for. It was the pacifist Cathars who in their turn – and with every justification – regarded the papal forces as the agents of Satan, and the Catholic version of Christianity as an extreme heresy.

A Cathar defends his beliefs before a tribunal of Catholic Inquisitors. Instigated by the papacy and organized by the Dominican brotherhood, the Inquisition invested itself with Draconian powers which even included exhuming and putting on trial the corpses of the deceased: a legal ploy which allowed the Papal authorities to seize the property of the surviving next of kin.

The lesson of history is clear: whether you regard any given belief as ‘heretical’ or not is simply down to which side you are on. And if you have the power base and the organization to push through your opinions by force, then it is your beliefs that get to be called the ‘correct’ ones. But supposing that things in 13th-century France had been allowed to take their natural course, and the growing popular wave of Catharism outstripped the existing Catholicism? We now might well be referring to Catholicism as the great heresy, and Catholics would find themselves on the fringe as a minority belief – if they still existed at all.

This is not as fanciful as it might sound. Contemporary scholarship now considers that it is possible, even plausible, that the original form of Christianity had more in common with Gnosticism, the predecessor of Catharism, than that it resembled anything which we now have come to recognize as ‘Christian’. That the Gnostics and their beliefs, like the Cathars a millennium later, were crushed by the forces of Catholicism is the contributing reason which led eventually to the establishing of the Holy Roman Empire and the complete dominance of the version of Christianity that it represented. And it is a matter of history that this dominance was accomplished, not by the peaceable winning of hearts and minds, but by waves of persecutions, the [3]machineries of terror, and a force of arms.

A woman accused of heresy is ‘put to the question’ – an Inquisitor’s euphemism for torture – using the cauda. Enough weights attached to the feet, or even a short drop, would have dislocated both of the victim’s shoulders. Note the crucifix on the table. My own belief says that anyone, anywhere, at any time who causes suffering or even death in the name of Christ is himself crucifying Christ anew.

So what also drives this blog is a sense of injustice about what has taken place in the past which led to Christianity as we now recognize it. Christianity might have become the dominant world religion, but which Christianity is the correct one? It is a religion which has become deeply divided against itself into some 38,000 different and distinct versions which we call denominations. There are differences of opinion about points of doctrine (the exact nature of the Holy Trinity and the form of Holy Communion, to name but two) which run so deep that the members of one denomination probably would not even worship in the church of another denomination. Could this very un-Christian divisiveness be itself a sign that the version which became the dominant one was not actually the correct one to begin with? For if it was the correct version of Christianity, why has it caused such deep rifts of faith? Would not all Christians simply now be Catholic?

In open defiance of Papal authority, Martin Luther famously nails his 95 theses to the door of the church in [4]Wittenburg, so beginning the Protestant Reformation. What is less well-known but equally a part of recorded history is that the founder of Protestantism was himself radically anti-Semitic, urging the forced expulsion of all Jews from Germany, and additionally advocating the genocide of the working classes. The ruling class took him at his word and 100,000 of his fellow-countrymen were slain.

Just about any post on this blog would have seen me marched to the stake (and also first incarcerated and tortured) even as recently as the 18th-century. But this blog exists, and that in itself is demonstration enough of the way in which the tide of history has turned. Political and civic power has slipped from the Church’s grasp. Contemporary scholarship and opinions are now freely accessible, both on the Internet and through any number of publications – including the complete translations in English of the Gnostic texts, suppressed by the Church for sixteen long centuries until their independent discovery at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. We at last can listen to the Gnostics in their own authentic voices. Those voices are now once more abroad in the world, and this particular genie is not going back in the bottle.

The first two pages of the Gospel of Thomas: one of only two copies known. All other copies were believed to have been destroyed in the purges ordered by Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria. The text is a series of sayings by Jesus in the form of ‘wisdom teachings’. Thomas is not a name, but a term meaning ‘The Twin’, which could imply that this author sought to be the perfect mirror or reflection of these teachings.

When these subjects have come up in conversation, it has frequently taken me aback just how little Christians seem to know about the background of their own faith. This is a belief and a code of ethics which for many governs their very lives, and yet how many actually know the nuts and bolts of how the Bible came into being historically, and the different processes and individuals who were involved in its at-times alarmingly arbitrary shaping? There seems to be a general acceptance that ‘things are as they are’, and that the early Church Fathers who did the shaping ‘must have known best’.

Whether Irenaeus, Athanasius, Tertullian, Augustine and others who shaped the Bible and Christian doctrine to its present form really did ‘know best’ is a question for debate. The point is to know about what they actually did, and what their motives and personal agendas were for making the choices which they made. And not just the [5]tidy versions which can be read on any number of Christian websites, but the hands-on history of the way things happened.

‘Saint’ Irenaeus. The self-styled arbiter of ‘The Truth’, his writings contain tirades of toxic invective against all things which he personally considered to be heretical. But his methods for deciding what should or should not become scripture were startlingly vague.

Thus, of all the many gospels then in circulation, Irenaeus in the 2nd-century kept only four of his own personal choosing to [6]include in scripture. Why four? Because, as he informs us himself, there are "four zones in the world and four principal winds.” Yes, that really was this man’s sketchy logic behind his decision: a decision that would affect the whole subsequent development of Christianity. Who decided that he had the necessary authority to take such far-reaching action? He did.

But heresies come in different forms, of which religious heresies are but one. There also are social heresies, such as the fact that in the tough-guy society of Ancient Sparta homosexuality was not merely encouraged: it was [7]mandatory. And there also are scientific heresies. These can go either way. It flies in the face of both science and common sense to believe that Tyrannosaurus rex, the most awesome carnivore known, was on board Noah’s Ark and ate coconuts. And yet this is an on-the-record statement by the Creationist CEO of the [8]Creation Museum in Kentucky. But other forms of scientific heresies are more challenging. Science might deny the existence of [9]ley lines, even though they can be plotted on any good map with an ordinary pencil and rule. And conventional archaeology will insist that the [10]Great Pyramid of Egypt was built as a pharaoh’s tomb, even though no evidence whatever has been found to confirm this. So these heresies as well have their place on this blog.

Two principal European ley lines intersect at Avebury: a major Megalithic sacred site which existed long before any church was built, and which still exists today. Numerous other sites not shown here are also found along these leys. It was a common practice to build churches upon the foundations of the pagan sites which the new faith destroyed. The Christianization of Europe was not a peaceable process, but cost hundreds of thousands of the lives of pagans who, like the Cathars and the Gnostics, refused forced conversion and died as martyrs for their faith.

It is a big deal for me that others can rely on the accuracy of the material which I present here. I take time to get things right, which also is why I list my sources for each post where that is appropriate: the option is there for readers independently to check things for themselves should they wish to. And when discussing actual passages of scripture I will cite chapter and verse for the same reason. To be frank, the Bible does at times say some very weird, contradictory and shocking things. If I myself find it hard to believe that those things are actually there in scripture (and they are), then I assume that others might want to check for themselves for that very reason.

This timeline graphic created for my post about [11]Jesus in India seemed to be the most effective way of underscoring in visual form just how little we know about the life of Jesus. The period from his early teens until the last two years of his life is a complete unknown. This certainly invites speculation, and what I discovered is that to make a journey along the Silk Road from Galilee to the mountains of the Hindu Kush was for him not just possible, but entirely plausible.

As readers will have noticed, I also create a lot of the artwork, maps and other graphics for my posts. It all takes time, and if at times my posts do not appear as regularly as I would wish, it is simply due to the pressures of other work which needs my attention.

So the Shadows in Eden blog sets out to be a serious investigation into why we believe what we believe, who gets to decide what is ‘correct’ for us to believe, and ultimately, what ‘faith’ actually is. It is a journey which I myself am on in the hope of discovering some answers to what for me are some very fundamental questions, and I am delighted and gratified that so many are coming on that journey with me. Many, many thanks to you, my reader, whatever faith or non-belief, spirituality or interest in these subjects you might hold. 

Hawkwood

A NOTE ABOUT COMMENTS: I review every comment before I publish it, and not all comments see the light of day. One common reason for this is that the comment in question simply has nothing specifically to do with the topic of the post on which it has been left. Sometimes such general comments can be useful, but not always. And while I am prepared to make exceptions, a comment which is simply a [12]link to someone else’s blog or website will probably not be published either. Nevertheless, comments are welcome, particularly those comments which are a constructive response to what any given post is about. And anyone is certainly free to disagree with what I have said, because that can create a meaningful exchange of different points of view.

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Giordano Bruno's Infinite Space.

[2] Please see my post A Dark Crusade.

[3] Run by the Dominican brotherhood, the Inquisition was initially established as a temporary Church institution to eliminate the last of the Cathars once the military campaigns against them had ended. Instead, it lasted in various forms into the 18th-century, encouraging a social climate of paranoia through informing, even against members of one’s own family, incarceration and torture of both men, women and children, and death by being burned alive. Once sentence was passed, the condemned were handed over to the civic authorities for execution to ensure that Church records remained untainted by the blood of its victims.

[4] Please see my post Martin Luther's Final Solution.

[5] To name but one example, the online Catholic Encyclopedia manages to write an entire entry extolling the virtues of 'Saint' Helena (right, by Francesco Morandini), the mother of Emperor Constantine, without once mentioning the fact that she instigated the brutal murder of her daughter-in-law Fausta so that she could take Fausta's place at her son's side and become his consort in all but name. These dark Freudian deeds the Encyclopedia apparently saw fit to quietly brush under the carpet. Please see my post Helena and the True Cross, which also covers the bizarre Middle Ages trade in 'holy relics', which appears to have been prompted by Helena's recovery in Jerusalem of the 'True Cross'.

[6] Please see my post The Gospel According to Somebody.

[7] Please see my post Coming of Age in Sparta.

[8] Please see my post How do Creationists know what Dinosaurs looked like?.

[9] Please see my post Ley Lines: Patterns of the Ancient Earth.

[10] Please see my post A Night Inside the Great Pyramid.

[11] Please see my post Jesus in India.

[12] Although the link will still be published in a copy/paste form, Blogger does not in any case allow live links in post comments.


Sources:
The sources referenced to write this post can be found in the listed sources on the above posts, with some additional material being drawn from the sources listed on other posts on this blog. The painting of the Cathar before the tribunal is by Jean-Paul Laurens, the painting of the use of the cauda is by Nicolay Bessonov, and the painting of Martin Luther in Wittenburg is by Ferdinand Pauwels.  

They Shall Take Up Serpents

“And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” These stirring words spoken by Jesus in Mark 16:17-18 have been seized upon by certain Christian [1]literalists who have been only too eager to proclaim their faith by following to the letter what this Biblical text recommends.

“They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them…” ~ Gospel of Mark, 16:18. These words have been used to justify the practice of venomous snake handling as part of a religious service. But the words did not originally appear in this gospel, and who included them and why is unknown. The snake is the species commonly used in such services, the Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus). Photo by Tad Arensmeier.

Ah, but that is the problem with Biblical literalism. It apparently is not that big on scriptural [2]scholarship. It seems that these particular literalists have not been following original scripture at all. The last twelve verses of Mark, which include this text, were not originally a part of the gospel, but were added as much as several centuries later for reasons unknown, by a hand that is equally unknown. In short: we have no idea who added these words to Mark, or why they were added – except, apparently (and perhaps even mischievously), as a goading exhortation to reckless tests of faith. And in spite of their spurious authorship, these tests of faith have been, and are, practiced by various church communities, mostly in the Appalachian region of the United States.

The legality of snake handling – in this case, highly-venomous rattlesnakes – as part of a religious service is an involved one, which is why services which include this practice are sometimes held in the home rather than in a church. And although the whole point of snake handling is to demonstrate immunity through the strength of one’s faith, there have been many recorded [3]deaths from snakebite during these services, including that of the movement’s founder, George Went Hensley, and one of its most ardent practitioners, [4]Gregory James ‘Jamie’ Coots. That the number of fatalities nevertheless seems to be kept within [5]reasonable limits perhaps owes more to the condition of the captive snakes than to any supposed immunity granted from on high. The snakes would seem to be [6]lethargic through stress and undernourishment, and seldom live longer than a month in the confines of their boxes.

Rattlesnakes in their boxes await possible handling during a service at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name church in Middlesboro, Kentucky.

Without crunching the numbers, I nevertheless am going to make the reasonable assumption that, given all factors, including the condition of the snakes, the proportion of total deaths would be the same whether or not the context were within a religious service. But whatever you might personally think about this practice, highlighting the practice itself is not what drives me to write this particular post. For its participants, serpent handling is about faith. But there is a sense in which I am aware that the reverse is also true: that faith is itself a form of serpent handling.

We take our faith out of the box, and the very power of the thing in turn gives us a sense of empowerment. Faith can be a powerful force indeed, and the more that force is felt and experienced, the more we feel strengthened by our faith. It is a classic positive feedback situation. But faith can bite. At any given moment it can twist around and sink its teeth into the very person who is handling it. This bite might be so subtle that at first we hardly feel it. It is that moment when we truly start to believe that our faith (whatever it might be) is surely the only ‘right’ one, and that all other faiths are in some way flawed, or even just plain ‘wrong’. Instead of tolerantly thinking ‘this faith is right for me, and for me personally’, we drift into the mindset: ‘this faith is the only true faith’.

“..And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” Bottles of lethal poisons lined up ready for possible consumption during a service at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name church.

The next step in the progress of this coursing toxicity is [7]proselytizing our faith. Indeed, proselytizing might actually be a requirement of our faith. We actually come to believe that we truly can improve someone if we can persuade them to believe what we believe, that we can ‘save’ them by getting them to follow the same faith as ourselves. We already have lost sight of the fact that, in human terms, this is a presumptuous conceit. 

So we already have come to think that our faith is the only ‘right’ one, and from this one dangerous thought flows all the misery, all the conflicts, which have so plagued and shamed religious belief through the centuries. It is dangerous because it breeds intolerance, specifically: intolerance for the beliefs of others. And unless we become aware of what is happening to us, our system becomes more toxic. Eventually the levels of toxicity might increase until we arrive at the fatal moment when we relinquish both the purity of our faith and our own humanity. We persuade ourselves that, yes, it is okay actually to take the life of someone who believes in something with which we disagree, which we consider is ‘wrong’.

The fortress of Montségur in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, which was the site of the last stand of the Cathars. Branded by the Vatican as heretics, a [8]crusade was waged against them which saw the deaths by massacre and burning of one million pacifist Cathars and their local Catholic sympathisers, effectively exterminating Cathar beliefs. This religion-based Christian-against-Christian genocide remains one of the darkest and most shameful episodes in European history.

Faith can be empowering, certainly. But its very power can also make it a tricky and even a dangerous thing to handle. As soon as we imagine that we can improve someone by getting them to believe what we believe, or at the most extreme, when we actually are prepared to kill someone in the name of our faith, then we have abandoned our own faith in favour of a new and toxic god, and we follow that god into a dark and unknown territory.

And true assertions of faith are of course something else. They come in forms less sensational and more confronting than snake handling, and often-enough must be borne in the silence of the heart. Coping with loss and uncomprehending grief, contending with an insidious and life-threatening affliction, being helpless in the face of blind and bigoted injustice, can make taking up serpents as a test of faith look like so much misguided and melodramatic posturing.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] I have avoided mentioning a specific denomination for these literalists, as I understand that they prefer to shun denominational definition as part of their beliefs. 

[2] This apparently not only applies to those who take Biblical texts literally. In my experience, Christians generally seem to have only a vague idea about how and when the texts which comprise the Bible were actually compiled, which to me is startling enough for those who use these texts as a foundation for their moral conduct, even for their very lives.

[3] Deaths by snakebite (during the course of a religious service) between 1955, when the movement’s founder George Went Hensley (left) was fatally bitten, and 1998 (of John Wayne ‘Punkin’ Brown, whose wife was fatally bitten three years earlier), are thought to number over seventy. Ralph Hood, professor of social psychology and the psychology of religion at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, has documented over one hundred deaths. As I suggest in my closing comments of this post, such voluntary flirting with death must seem like a slap in the face to someone who is told that they have cancer. This is why, to me, shame rather than ridicule is the appropriate response to serpent handling as part of a religious service. 

[4] Gregory James ‘Jamie’ Coots (right), pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name church in Middlesboro, Kentucky, was fatally bitten while conducting a service in February, 2014. Three months later his son Cody, who took over his father’s ministry, was bitten while handling rattlesnakes prior to a service, but fortunately recovered. From: Months after snake-handling preacher's death, his son recovering from snakebite, by Bill Estep, Kentucky Lexington Herald, May 27, 2014. Retrieved on September 16, 2014.

[5] But are any such deaths ‘reasonable’? Surely any death caused by reckless misadventure is unreasonable and avoidable. Those who are bitten while handling rattlesnakes as part of a religious service refuse all medical assistance. If the bite is fatal, then their community does not blame them for lack of faith, merely concluding that it was ‘their time’. To me, and perhaps for you as well, this is fatalism in extremis. 

[6] It is tempting for this reason to speculate that the real test of faith would be in only handling rattlesnakes which either have been freshly-caught or which are in optimal condition. But for the sake of those humans involved I’m not recommending this, however stalwart their faith might be. Neither do I agree with keeping any animals in captivity unless those animals are provided with the best conditions possible for their circumstances. Animals cannot demand rights for themselves, which is why humans carry the responsibility to provide such conditions.

Eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes in their boxes at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name church.

[6 cont.] This includes the strident macho posturing of so-called 'Rattlesnake Roundup' events, which are actually causing the serious depletion of rattlesnake populations in the areas where these events are held. From: Rattlesnake Roundups Leading to Demise of Eastern Diamondback. The study was published in the August 2009 issue of Herpetological Conservation and Biology. Presumably this in turn will now mean a proportional unchecked rise in the number of rodents (which otherwise would have gone onto these snakes’ menu) in these areas.

[7] Taking such action in conversation with a close friend is already presumptuous. Doing so to a total stranger, as such door-to-door proselytizing as the Church of Mormon and Jehovah's Witnesses practice, is both disrespectful to the beliefs or non-beliefs of others and a wretched example of being 'bitten' by one's own faith, as my post suggests. When Jehovah's Witnesses come knocking at my door (which happens often-enough) I am always half tempted to let them in to discuss what they wish to tell me. As yet I have not done so, which for their sakes is perhaps a mercy.

[8] Please see my post A Dark Crusade. The notorious Inquisition (left) run by the Dominican brotherhood was originally founded specifically to eradicate the last remnants of the Cathars and revert all their property to the Papacy once the crusaders' military campaign had exhausted itself. Instead of being disbanded as an institution of the Church after the campaign to eliminate the Cathars was over, the Inquisition survived into the 19th-century.

For the Record: "Rattlesnakes are also among the most reasonable forms of dangerous wildlife: their first line of defence is to remain motionless; if you surprise them or cut off their retreat, they offer an audio warning; if you get too close, they head for cover. Venom is intended for prey so they're reluctant to bite, and 25 to 50 percent of all bites are dry - no venom is injected."   Leslie Anthony: Snakebit: Confessions of a Herpetologist. Greystone Books, 2008.

A Dangerous List: In answer to someone who might think: what would he know, sitting safely in the Netherlands which has no creatures in the wild that are even remotely dangerous, I would reply: I was raised in Australia, which is home to some of the deadliest animals on the planet, both on land and in the surrounding seas, and as a state museum staff member I encountered quite a few of them, including tiger snakes (Notechis), redback spiders (Latrodectus), a stonefish (Synanceia), a cone shell (Conus) and a small blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena). So which one of these has a bite or sting that can be potentially fatal? All of them. 

The Choice of Species: This in turn invites further speculation that the practice of snake handling as part of a religious service is rather down to which venomous species are available in the region. It has to be said that there is something about rattlesnakes (or even copperheads) that is kind of cool, even mythic. And rattlesnakes are not regarded as an actively aggressive species. But supposing that the regional venomous species were instead Australian tiger snakes or the notoriously aggressive king brown? Would these deadly but less physically imposing species be handled during the service? A king brown (above) has been known even to attack someone who was quietly asleep. There is a sense that the choice of species would alter the game plan, and therefore the willingness to test one’s faith in such a reckless way. 

A Fragment of Love

Please read the following short passage of church doctrine, and see if you find it sympathetic:

“It does not exist in a fixed form, but only by the mutual agreement of persons. It has no members except for those who feel that they belong to it. It has no rivals because it does not nourish the spirit of competition. It has no ambition because it only wishes to serve. It does not have any national boundaries because love does not act in this way. It does not close itself off, as it tries to enrich all groups and religions. It respects all the great teachers of all times who revealed the truth of love. All who belong to it practice the truth of love with their whole being. He who belongs to it knows that.

“It does not try to teach others but only tries to be, and by being, to give. It lives in the knowledge that the whole earth is a living being and that we are part of it. It knows that the time of the last return has arrived; the way of self-surrender, in free will to return to unity. It does not make itself known by loud words, but works in the free domain of being. It salutes all those who have enlightened the path of love and gave their lives for it. It does not create any ranks in its midst and no elevation of anybody, because the one is no greater than the other. It does not promise reward, neither in this nor in another life, yet only the joy of being in that love.

“Its members recognise each other by their behaviour, their way of being, by the look in their eyes and by no other external act than to embrace each other in a brotherly and sisterly way. They know neither fear nor shame and their witness will always be truthful in good as in bad times. The church of love has no secret, has neither mystery nor initiation except for the deep knowledge of the power of love, as the world must change, if we as persons wish it so; but only if first we change ourselves. All those who feel that they belong to it do indeed belong. They belong to the church of love.”

************

Perhaps you agree with me that you would have to be a hard soul indeed not to find this declaration sympathetic. Indeed, in its intentions it sounds remarkably contemporary, and we recognize in it the holistic views of our own world. It is certainly compassionate and tolerant of the views and beliefs of others in a ‘live and let live’ way. It displays humility, taking a stance more of service to others than showing any worldly ambitions of its own. Can you belong to this church of love? Of course you can, in your heart and in your being, if you find its declaration sympathetic. But there is no church as such: there is no building which you can enter and join the congregation. And there is no doctrine to follow, other than what you have read above. But who are its members? Perhaps more to the point: where are they?

What you have read above is one of the few surviving fragments of Cathar writing, and it dates, not from our own times, but from the middle of the 12th-century – the year 1148, to be exact. That Cathar beliefs, more by default than by design, sidelined the authority of the Papal offices proved to be their undoing. The Pope, alarmed at this perceived threat to his [1]power, and concerned by the ever-growing popularity of the Cathars, instigated the Christian-against-Christian [2]Albigensian Crusade.

Over half a century some one million Cathars and their regional Catholic sympathisers were slaughtered. Since strict Cathars were non-combative, most of the so-called military campaigns against them were of the siege-and-massacre type. Those not put to the sword by the Papal crusaders were rounded up and burned alive. And when the military campaign exhausted itself, the Papal Inquisition run by the Dominican order was established to take care of the rest. Whole areas of the Cathar heartlands in the Languedoc region of the south of France were emptied of their populations, and their lands and property were handed over to the Papal offices.

This is why the Cathar church no longer exists: it was exterminated by the will of the Papacy. What survives are these few scraps of Cathar doctrine to tell us how their faith expressed itself: fragments of love for their fellows and tolerance for the beliefs of others. The rest has long blown away on the winds of history, scattered with the ashes of the victims into the still air above the Languedoc.

Hawkwood  

Notes:

[1] I have previously made the point on this blog that there is no such thing as ‘orthodox’ (implying 'correct' or 'right') in religious belief, since all beliefs have their own value. What exists in reality is a power base which allows one to call one’s beliefs ‘orthodox’, and from that power base to then brand other beliefs as ‘heretical’, ‘false’, ‘evil’ – or just plain wrong.

[2] For an account of the Papal campaign and its aftermath please see my post A Dark Crusade. In that post I undertook to write a future post about Cathar beliefs. Allowing the Cathars to express themselves in their own words seemed to be a way to do that. Thanks to Emma for providing me with the Cathar text for this post.

The replica Cathar cross pendant is in my collection.

The Butcher of Canaan

What must be going through their minds? Dazed with defeat, dragged from their refuge and brought before the leader who had conquered them, these five men must have known that their future was as dark as the cave in which they had hidden, and which had become their prison when their enemy had blocked its only exit. If there is any hope in their thoughts at all, it must be in the wish that this man before whom they now stand would prove himself to be a man of honor, a principled leader who, guided by his [1]beliefs, would be magnanimous in victory, would display some measure of mercy as a gesture of true greatness.

Dragged from the cave which had become their prison.

It is not to be. Instead, they find themselves forced to the ground, are publicly humiliated as, at the prompting of their leader, each captain in his turn sets his foot upon their necks, grinding their faces into the dust of their own homeland. This grim ritualized humiliation over with, the leader himself then steps forward and personally beats them before finally killing them. He then hangs the five corpses on trees and leaves them hanging there until sundown. The corpses are then cut down and thrown unceremoniously into the cave which had been their refuge, and the entrance is sealed forever.

Each captain in his turn sets his foot upon their necks.

It is an incident shocking in its ruthlessness. If these five men were hostages of Al Qaida we would be howling our disgust. Instead, we know these details because all that I have described above can be read in the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua (Joshua 10:22-27), and it is Joshua himself who is the leader in question. My previous [2]post about Joshua dealt with the scriptural account of the defeat of Jericho and its apparent conflict with the archaeology on the ground. That post questioned the veracity of the scriptural account, but with this post I’m assuming these events to be true – not because I personally believe them to be, but because millions around the world accept that they are. This post is about the consequences of accepting that truth.

Historians might disagree about the exactness of the frontiers, but there is no disagreement that Canaan was a part of the Egyptian empire. This map shows the empires as they were during the reign of the heretic king Akhenaten in Egypt, which paralleled the historical situation during the scriptural account of the Israelite conquest of Canaan.

Joshua again presented himself as a subject for a post when I read in my King James Version that the editors describe Joshua’s life as being filled with [3]‘excitement, variety, success and honor’. It’s hard to argue with the first three. But honor? As I have come to realize, an Apologist will find a way to justify [4]anything – as long as that ‘anything’ is found in scripture. So justify this: the Book of Joshua provides us with a list of Canaanite cities conquered by Joshua, but only gives a figure for those slain for one of them – the city of Ai to the west of Jericho. Since, without exception, the entire populations of these cities are slaughtered by the Israelites, and we are given an initial list of ten cities and one battle, as the numbers slain in Ai are given as 12,000, then a low-end estimate for the total inhabitants of these cities slain could feasibly have been some 80-100,000 civilians.

Had Joshua’s Israelite forces existed they would have found the Canaanite battleground already occupied. Events above the timeline are confirmed and corroborated by history, and yet none of these events and the occupying forces which were involved in them are mentioned in the scriptural account of Joshua’s supposed conquest. The events in Joshua could have taken place sometime between 14-1300BCE. While these dates coincide with a period of relative weakness of Egyptian power in Canaan, it was the Hittites, not the Israelites, who took advantage of this.

But further along, we are told that the total number of Canaanite kings defeated by Joshua was thirty one (Joshua 12:24), so the number of field engagements, battles, sieges, kingdoms and other conquests would raise this total considerably. Let’s go with a reasonable estimate of a grand total of 180,000-200,000 Canaanites killed by the Israelites, both armed forces and civilians. Not a [5]soul was left alive in any of the Canaanite cities which fell to Joshua’s forces.  Men and women, children and the elderly: all were put to the sword without mercy. Again, it is scripture itself which tells us this.

Achan is brought before Joshua to face judgement. The sentence: death by stoning. 

So what about Israelite losses and defeats? Forget defeats, because none are mentioned. And losses? In the entire campaign, we are told only of 36 Israelite casualties (Joshua 7:5), slain by the men of Ai in an Israelite ruse that partly misfired. The following verses describe Joshua’s despair at these Israelite deaths, even to questioning the direction of his whole campaign. It turns out that a certain Achan, in violation of God’s stipulation, could not resist doing a little looting in defeated Jericho. This had angered God, which in turn had caused things to go against those 36 Israelites. Joshua gets back on God’s good side by having Achan stoned to death for his misdemeanour, and the campaign is back on track. Evidently a spot of looting by a single individual angered God considerably more than the Israelites’ unbridled slaughter of thousands of Jericho’s civilians. The total annihilation of the population of Ai is what follows, so we can conclude that God is again on Joshua’s side.

“And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.” Joshua 6:21. This single verse from scripture graphically relates the fate of the civilian population of Jericho at the hands of the Israelites: a fate repeated for every Canaanite city which they were supposed to have conquered. It presents those who accept the Bible as the revealed word of God with a stark choice: either reject scripture and take responsibility for your own moral worth, or accept it as fact, and attempt to morally justify the slaughter of women, children and the elderly in the name of God.

But the Canaanites were not monsters who needed to be cleared out of the way as if Joshua were some dragon-slayer ridding the land of a curse. They were, it is worth remembering, ordinary folk concerned with gathering in their harvests, trading what they had to trade, keeping their families, living out their lives and paying due homage and respect to their [4][13]beliefs. And they were living on their own land. From the Canaanite side of things, Joshua and the Israelites must have seemed like agents of chaos: a devastating invasion force which wreaked havoc and destruction, slaughtering the families which they had struggled to raise, stealing their lands and turning their world into dust and ruin.

Akhenaten (left) and Ramesses II, both with very different attitudes to Egyptian interests in Canaan, and during whose reigns the region would become alternately more chaotic and more subservient. 

But there were other regional forces in Canaan at this time. Why is there no mention whatever in scripture of the Israelites encountering Egyptian military resistance? Tablet correspondences found in [6]Amarna and from the later reigns of the pharaohs Seti I, Thutmose III and Ramesses II actually mention Canaan, which was still a part of the Egyptian Empire. Egyptian forces were garrisoned there - and the Egyptians would later go to war to defend their Canaan territory against the fearsome Hittites. So what happened? Did they just sit back and watch as Joshua stole this part of their empire from under their noses? Why do scrupulous Egyptian records frequently mention Canaan but not the [7]Israelites? Is it because there were in reality no Israelite forces for Egypt to be concerned about?

A Canaanite khopesh (top) from the Late Bronze Age, with (below) a bronze Egyptian khopesh from the tomb of Tutankhamen. The fluting on the metal would have given the weapon extra strength. Canaanite weapons were often copies of weapons used by the Egyptian occupying forces. Very little is known about Israelite weapons from this period, although it is assumed that they also followed Egyptian precedents. The distinctive blade probably evolved from the shape of an axe, and in Dynastic Egypt the khopesh also had a ceremonial function. The Assyrian sword - the sapara - also followed this design.

Were we to read this exact same account of the conquest of Canaan in an [8]other-than-scriptural source, and were we to view Joshua simply as a figure from history in the light of these events, we surely would conclude (if we have any moral values) that here was a conqueror who truly gloried in slaughter, as ruthless in his nature and in his deeds as any Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan – or even any Babylonian despot from his own world. Instead, as we know, the Book of Joshua became canonical scripture, and its commander is looked upon as the worthy successor to Moses who led his people into the Promised Land. Normal human decency has been stood on its head, and a man who otherwise might have – with every deserved justification – become known to history as the Butcher of Canaan ends up instead being described as a man of honor.

Hawkwood


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Part Two: The Square Peg of Scriptural Genocide, the Round Hole of Moral Acceptability

Justifying the genocides: I am aware of the various Apologist (Wolterstorff, Copan, Flannagan, et al) justifications for the genocides in the Book of Joshua, which claim that they are intended to be taken symbolically in some way. But such Apologist explanations for this scriptural trail of death fail to address the moral premise that, real or not, these massacres are stated in scripture as being executed with the blessing of God. Whether the massacres were symbolic, allegorical, etc. becomes immaterial to the stark fact that in scripture God was okay with all this, and actually approved of it (hence the Israelites' sweeping victories with improbably negligible losses to themselves). Indeed, at the battle of Gibeon (Joshua 10:10 and 14) we are told that God personally joined in the slaughter. My point stands: what does this say about the Israelites as a people, and about the deity who guided them?

An ivory Canaanite game board with gold inlay, complete with counters or pegs of gold, Late Bronze Age. This is one of the few such boards to survive relatively intact. Such sophisticated craftsmanship and luxurious styling present a different picture from the one of an [3]‘idolatrous and dissolute’ people put forward by those who seek to demonize the Canaanites in order to justify scriptural genocide.

The historicity of the genocides: Because of the anthropological (linguistic) and archaeological discrepancies with the purported Israelite conquest of Canaan and lack of corroboration from other contemporary sources, I personally am not convinced that the Israelites conquered Canaan at all. The most likely historical scenario is that at the time of Joshua in the Late Bronze Age many of the Canaanite cities that were reported as being conquered by the Israelites were already in a state of semi-ruin (which is what the archaeology on the ground indicates) from the Egyptian conquest and occupation. Almost a full millennium later, the Israelites, who in all probability emerged from the Canaanite diaspora that was displaced by the Egyptians, saw the ruins and exploited them by contriving a conquest by their own forebears that never actually took place. The cities already were in a state of disrepair, and the writers of Joshua, penning their tale some eight to ten centuries after the time of the presumed Israelite conquest, drew their own colourful conclusions as to who did the conquering, thus providing themselves with a fallacious conquerors’ pedigree.

The Hittites: masters of war, and men of [9]iron. The notoriously bellicose Hittites were in northern Canaan during the time frame of Joshua's own purported incursion. And yet, as with the Egyptian military forces, no mention is made in scripture of any Hittite-Israelite encounter.

In the shadow of Beit She’an: If there is one thing which confronts us with the improbability of the scriptural account of the conquest of Canaan it is the existence of the fortress of Beit She’an (a.k.a. Beth-Shean). From the Book of Joshua we learn that, having conquered the southern Canaanite cities, Joshua regrouped his forces at Gilgal and then marched north: a route that would have taken him directly up the west bank of the Jordan River Valley. He defeats the near-impossible odds of a powerful Canaanite alliance at the waters of Merom, then swings east to sack and burn the city of Hazor. In scripture these events all move along swimmingly, but a map of that time frame suggests a very different scenario.

The Location of Beit She'an Fortress 

The command centre of the Egyptian occupying forces in Canaan, Beit She’an’s highly strategic location assured its control both of the east-west routes through the highlands to the coast, and the approach to the northern Jordan River Valley. The palace of the Egyptian governor of Canaan was also situated on its heights. The route of Joshua’s forces supplied by scripture would have left Joshua no option but to pass north in the very shadow of this stronghold – and yet in scripture it is as if it does not exist.

Beit She'an as it is today

Beit She’an was considered to be near-impregnable. Only after 1100BCE was it overrun – not by the Israelites, but by the Philistines. So what did Joshua and the Israelites do – sneak past the fortress while the Egyptian military was having lunch? One hardly can imagine the Egyptian governor leaning over the parapet and shouting, “Good luck in the north, lads!” as the Israelites tramped by. For the whole time frame of the supposed Israelite conquest, Canaan was controlled by the Egyptians. And yet the Book of Joshua never once mentions the presence of the then-resident Egyptian forces stationed in Canaan, or any Israelite-Egyptian military encounter.

The idea that the Egyptians just sat back and watched as those upstart Israelites snatched a swathe of their empire from under their noses is stretching all historical credulity – and strongly suggests the way in which the writers of the Book of Joshua had drifted out of touch with the historical situation on the ground of almost a thousand years before. Egypt, remember, was still powerfully in control of Canaan after the Israelites were supposed to have conquered it.

The approved portrayal of Joshua: a suitably heroic Bronze Age figure clad in glinting armour. But his armour is from the Iron Age of centuries later, and his helmet (which also is from the Iron Age) is that of the Assyrian cavalry - the future conquerors of Israel. Evidently this artist was somewhat hazy about historical time frames.

The Christian perception of Joshua: For me to read on a North Carolina minister’s [10]blog the continuing justifications which a Christian must produce to hammer the square peg of scriptural genocide into the round hole of moral acceptability (even after admitting, as this minister does, that the conquest of Canaan was ‘brutal’) is not merely sad: it is morally repugnant. And this particular Christian blog is by no means unique. Among others I have come across is the [11]Grace Communion International website, which actually states at the outset that “Joshua is one of the Bible’s great books of courage and faith.” – but then glosses perfunctorily over the Israelites’ multiple acts of mass slaughter. Yet another Christian [12]blog indulges in the usual [13]demonizing of the Canaanites, and explains that the genocides are not actually genocides but (quoting Calvinist pastor Mark Dever) “the expiration of God’s mercy” – which for me reading it provided another WTF moment. This blogger (who apparently is a Christian missionary) then goes on to explain that the mass slaughter in the Book of Joshua does not actually count as genocide because “God owns the land, and the people in it. They are his to do with as he pleases.”

What if Joshua was a Canaanite? I am left to reflect that had Joshua been a Canaanite, and had he committed all the various atrocities attributed to him in the book which bears his name, Christians would have painted him blacker-than-black. Instead, he indulges in acts of truly bestial carnage and, apparently merely because he is ‘on their side’ (whatever that means) Christians have him repeatedly emerging smelling like a rose garden, and as an individual who enjoys the respect of three world religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam). Is such selective blindness to serial acts of callous inhumanity what faith and moral awareness are about?
Hawkwood

A special thank you to any reader who has stayed the distance over this, my longest post to date. Scripture cannot be divorced from the historical context in which it was written, any more than its moral values should be viewed as a special case, divorced from moral values which we otherwise would uphold. To endorse genocide merely because it happens in scripture is to uphold the ethics of despotism.

Notes:
[1] A god of genocide: The point here is that Joshua’s god – the God of the Bible and of Christianity – is supposed to be a morally superior and more humanly responsive deity than the beliefs of the lands which Joshua conquered. But we are in a bizarre situation in which events in the Book of Joshua make it manifestly clear that this is not so. The God in Joshua (and not just in this particular book of scripture) is palpably a deity, not of principles and values worthy of emulation, but of such gross moral standards that he actually approves of and appears to encourage acts of slaughter and even genocide which are committed in his name. This is not my personal opinion; it literally is the scenario which scripture presents to us.

[2] Joshua, Jericho, the Trumpets and the Wall.


[3] Demonizing the enemy: This is quoted from the Zondervan King James Study Bible, page 274. Incredibly, this Apologists’ Bible justifies even Joshua’s acts of mass slaughter by taking pains to describe the Canaanites as “idolatrous and dissolute” (demonizing one’s perceived enemies is a standard ploy for justifying the unjustifiable) and the bloody campaign against them as being part of “a history of redemption unfolding… with its interplay of divine grace and judgement” (page 272), which is, I believe, the most astonishingly callous way of justifying genocide that I have come across anywhere. If the Canaanites were so depraved, how is it possible that one of them became the architect of the very house of God? Yes, it was a northern Canaanite (Phoenicia to the Greeks) who designed Solomon’s temple (my painting of its reconstruction above) in Jerusalem.

[4] Gods of Canaan and Israel: The justification given in Joshua is a justification of belief and of territory: the territory of claiming Canaan for the Israelites in the name of their god, and the struggle between an emerging monotheistic faith and a resident polytheistic faith. The principal Canaanite god is named in scripture as Baal. Baal is however not a name, but a titular term of address meaning ‘Lord’. Since various deities were called by this term – including originally the Israelites’ own deity – isolating which ‘Baal’ is being referred to in scripture is down to region. The Baal of northern Canaan was a rain and weather deity – likely attributes for a people for whom rainfall and a good harvest were critical. The gods both of Canaan and Israel had animal sacrifices made to them; the life blood of those animals flowed in their name. So which god could reasonably claim the moral high ground: the god of the Canaanites who was petitioned for good harvests, or the god of the Israelites who encouraged mass slaughter?

[5] The solitary exception is the woman Rahab (right) and her family in Jericho, whose life was spared after she had provided refuge for two Israelite spies.

[6] Please see my post The Amarna Heresies. Ironically, it was the pharaoh Akhenaten’s self-absorbed preoccupation with art rather than with foreign policy which gave the Hittites their foot in the door of northern Canaan. 

[7] Please see note [2] in my post Joshua, Jericho, the Trumpets and the Wall. Ethnically, the Israelites were Canaanites, belonging to the same principal language group of Hebrew, which is often a determining factor in establishing a people’s origins. The Egyptians referred frequently to the Habiru, a stateless brigandage in Canaan. It is thought that ‘Hebrew’ stems from this term.

[8] Ah, but that is the problem: there seem to be no independent historical sources for the Israelites’ conquest, which surely would not have gone unnoticed by the other regional powers involved.

[9]  In Joshua 17:18 we are famously told that the Canaanites had 'iron chariots'. Since the only people in this time frame known to use iron were the Hittites, it can be taken as a further indication of the degree to which the writers of Joshua in the Iron Age had little historical perspective of the situation in Bronze Age Canaan of many centuries before.    

[10] The Mattrix - The Canon of Glory: Joshua

[11] Grace Communion International - Joshua: Conflict and Conquest

[12] Brance Gillihan's Blog - Devoted to Destruction

[13] 'Sinful': Quoted from Brance Gillihan’s blog: “The Canaanites were wicked people. They worship demon gods to whom they sacrificed their own children by burning them alive. They engaged in perverted sexual practices as part of their worship. God is judging them for their sins.”  This picture (right) is doing the rounds of the Internet as 'Baal worship'. But the massive bronze idol is an archaeological nonsense, and the child sacrifice is a dubious anthropological one. There is no substantive evidence for such Canaanite sacrifices (the classical source for these lurid stories is actually in Carthage, not Canaan), but let’s assume them to be true. In what way is this more ‘sinful’ than all the atrocities - including the scripturally recorded killing of children - committed by Joshua which God smiled upon?


Sources:
Beth Alpert Nakhai: Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel. The American Schools of Oriental Research, Boston, MA, 2001.
Michael Sugarman: Trade and Power in Late Bronze Age Canaan. Academia.edu PDF.
Ian Shaw (editor): The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press. 2000.
Jonathan M. Golden: Ancient Canaan and Israel: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Rivka Gonen: Burial Patterns and Cultural Diversity in Late Bronze Age Canaan. The American Schools of Oriental Research, Boston, MA, 1992.
Gregorio Del Olmo Lete: Canaanite Religion According to the Liturgical Texts of Ugarit. Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, IN, 2004.

The three scenes from the Book of Joshua are painted by James Tissot, late 19th-early 20th-centuries. The artist of Joshua crossing the Jordan (incorrectly attributed on the Web to the author and minister J. W. McGarvey) and the artist of the imagined portrait of Rahab are both unidentified. The Canaanite khopesh is from Baidun Antiquities. The Egyptian khopesh is in the Cairo Museum, as is the statue of Akhenaten. The statue of Ramesses II is in the Turin Museum. The Canaanite board game is in the collection of the University of Chicargo. Reconstruction of Solomon's temple and the maps and timeline by Hawkwood, © David Bergen Studio, All Rights Reserved.