A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

In Nero, we can see the basic problem of human development: the moment human beings are
released from the pressure of necessity they seem to go rotten. And if that is so, then there is
something self-defeating about the very idea of civilisation, since its aim is to release us from
necessity. It seems to be a vicious circle. Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them
only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made
almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.
Yet although this is the truth, it is not the whole truth. As we examine human history, we realise
that man also seems to possess an instinctive counterbalance to this natural drift towards
criminality. In its most basic form, this seems to consist of an intuitive certainty that this narrow
world of the personal ego is not the whole world - that something far greater and more interesting
lies beyond it. This excited feeling of the sheer interestingness of the universe is inherent in all
poetry, music, science, philosophy and religion. When we read of great men - an Alexander or a
Frederick II - dying in a state of world-weary pessimism, we feel that they have somehow allowed
themselves to become blinded by fatigue and allowed their senses to close. Somewhere along the
way, they have missed the point. And when the conquerors and criminals have wreaked their havoc
and left the scene, the sense of magic and mystery flows back like a tide and sweeps away the
wreckage, leaving the beach smooth and clean again.
It is necessary to grasp this if we are to understand the remarkable spread of Christianity across the
civilised world. There had been dozens - probably hundreds - of religions before Christianity; we
have seen that there was a kind of worldwide religious explosion in the fifth century B.C. None had
achieved the same impact or spread with the same speed as Christianity. And this is basically
because Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism. Just as a pessimist is a man who
has to live with an optimist, so an idealist is a man who has to live with a materialist. Roman
religion was almost comically literal-minded; they believed, for example, that a vote in the senate
could send their late emperor to the abode of the gods. (It is true that this is not so different from
the Catholic Church’s procedure for canonisation.) Roman religion was not even original; it was
simply taken over wholesale from ancient Greece. Roman literature, Roman art, Roman
philosophy, were all superficial. There was nothing in Roman culture that could appeal to a man of
imagination. Christianity was an expression of a craving for a deeper meaning in human existence.
The agitator known as Jeshua - or Jesus - of Nazareth was born in about the twentieth year of the
reign of Augustus - around 10 B.C. Pompey the Great had placed the Jews under Roman rule in 63
B.C., and the Jews loathed it. Crassus had plundered the temple. Herod the Great, appointed by the
Romans to rule Judea, was as violent and murderous as any of the later Roman emperors, and was
hated by all the religion factions with the exception of the Hellenised Sadducees. So the expectation
of the long-awaited Messiah, a warrior-king who would free the Jews from foreign rule, increased
year by year.
The early records of Jesus of Nazareth were so tampered with by later Christians that it is difficult
to form a clear picture of his few brief years as a teacher and prophet. Even his physical description
was altered; it was reconstructed in the 1920s by the historian Robert Eisler in The Messiah Jesus
and John the Baptist. Among the documents Eisler used was a ‘wanted notice’ probably signed by
Pontius Pilate, and later quoted by the Jewish historian Josephus, whose reconstructed text runs as
follows:
At this time, too, there appeared a certain man of magical power, if it
is permissible to call him man, whom certain Greeks call a son of