THE other day I was talking to an assembly of teachers and scientific workers on the problem of getting the elements of a modern world outlook into the ordinary human mind during its all too brief years of schooling1 and initiation2. I was not persuading nor exhorting3; I was exposing my thoughts about one of the primary difficulties in the way of a World Pax which will save mankind from the destruction probable in putting the new wine of mechanical and biological power into the worn bottles of social and moral tradition. I dealt with the swiftness of life, the shortness of time available for learning and the lag and limitations of teaching.
In my survey of the minimum knowledge needed to make an efficient citizen of the world, I laid great stress upon history. It is the core of initiation. History explains the community to the individual, and when the community of interests and vital interaction has expanded to planetary dimensions, then nothing less than a clear and simplified world history is required as the framework of social ideas. The history of man becomes the common adventure of Everyman.
I deprecated the exaggerated importance attached to the national history and to Bible history in western countries. I maintained that the Biblical account of the Creation and the Fall gave a false conception of man’s place in this universe. I expressed the opinion that the historical foundation for world citizenship4 would be better laid if these partial histories were dealt with only in their proper relation to the general development of mankind. In particular I pointed5 out that Palestine and its people were a very insignificant6 part of the general picture. It was a side-show in the greater conflicts of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Nothing important, I said, ever began there or worked out there . . .
In saying that I felt that I was stating plain matter-of-fact to well-informed hearers. But it is not what I should have thought and said, forty years ago. And since the publication of my remarks, there have been a number of retorts and replies to my statement that have made me realise how widely and profoundly and by what imperceptible degrees, my estimate of this Jewish history has been changed since my early years and how many people still remain under my earlier persuasions7. Long after I ceased to be a Christian8, I was still obsessed9 by Palestine as a region of primary importance in the history of human development. I ranked it with Greece as a main source in human, moral and intellectual development. Most people still seem to do so. It may be interesting to state compactly why I have grown out Of that conviction.
Very largely it was through rereading the Bible after an i interlude of some years and with a fresh unprejudiced mind, that this change came about in my ideas. My maturer impression of that remarkable10 and various bale of literature which we call the Old Testament11 was that it had been patched a lot but very little falsified. Where falsification appeared, as in the number of hosts and slain12 in the Philistine13 bickerings, it was very naive14, transparent15 and understandable falsification.
I was not impressed by the general magnificence of the prose, about which one still hears so much. There are some splendidly plain and vivid passages and interludes of great dignity and beauty, but the bulk of the English Bible sounds to me pedestrian translator’s English, quite unworthy of the indiscriminate enthusiasm that has been poured out upon it. From their very diverse angles the books of the Bible have an entirely16 genuine flavour.
It is a collection; it is not a single book written ad hoc like the Koran. And the historical parts have the quality of honest history as well as the writers could tell it. Jewish history before the return from Babylon as the Bible gives it, is the unpretending story of a small barbaric people whose only gleam of prosperity was when Solomon served the purposes of Hiram by providing an alternative route to the Red Sea, and built his poor little temple out of the profits of porterage. Then indeed there comes a note of pride. It is very like the innocent pride of a Gold Coast negro whose chief has bought a motor-car. The prophetic books, it seems to me, reek17 of the political propaganda of the adjacent paymaster states and discuss issues dead two dozen centuries ago.
One has only to read the books of Ezra and Nehemiah to realise the real quality of the return of that miscellany of settlers from Babylon, a miscellany so dubious18 in its origins, so difficult to comb out. But a legend grew among these people of a Tremendous Past and of a Tremendous Promise. Solomon became a legend of wealth and wisdom, a proverb of superhuman splendour.
In the New Testament we hear of “Solomon in all his Glory.” It was a glory like that of the Kings of Tara. When I remarked upon this essential littleness of Palestine I did not expect any modern churchmen to be shocked. But I brought upon myself the retort from the bishops19 of Exeter and Gloucester that I was obsessed by “mere20 size” and that I had no sense of spiritual values. My friend, Mr. Alfred Noyes, reminded me that many pumpkins22 were larger than men’s heads, and what had I to say to that? But I had not talked merely of physical size. I had said that quite apart from size nothing of primary importance in human history was begun and nothing worked out in Palestine. That is I had already said quite definitely that Palestine was not a head but a pumpkin21 and a small one at that. A number of people protest. But, they say, surely the great network of modern Jewry began in Palestine and Christianity also began in Palestine! To which I answer, “I too thought that.” We float in these ideas from our youth up. But have we not all taken the atmosphere of belief about us too uncritically? Are either of these ideas sound? I myself have travelled from a habit of unquestioning acquiescence23 to entire unbelief. May not others presently do the same? I do not believe that Palestine was the cradle of either Jewry or Christendom.
So far as the origin of the Jews is concerned, the greater probability seems to me that the Jewish idea was shaped mainly in Babylon and that the return to Judea was hardly more of a complete return and concentration than the Zionist return today. From its beginning the Jewish legend was a greater thing than Palestine, and from the first it was diffused24 among all the defeated communities of the Semitic-speaking world.
The synthesis of Jewry was not, I feel, very much anterior25, if at all, to the Christian synthesis. It was a synthesis of Semitic-speaking peoples and not simply of Hebrews. It supplied a rallying idea to the Babylonian, the Carthaginian, the Phoenician, whose trading and financial methods were far in advance of those of the Medes, Persians, Greeks and Romans who had conquered them. It was a diffused trading community from the start.
Jewry was concentrated and given a special character far more by the Talmudic literature that gathered about the Old Testament collection, than by the Old Testament story itself Does anyone claim a Palestinian origin for the Talmud? I doubt if very much of the Bible itself was written in Palestine. I believe that in nine cases out of ten when the modern Jew goes back to wail26 about his unforgettable wrongs in Palestine he goes back to a country from which most of his ancestors never came.
When Paul started out on his earlier enterprise of purifying and consolidating27 Jewry before his change of front on the road to Damascus, he was on his way to a Semitic — a Jewish community there, and Semitic communities existed and Semitic controversies28 were discussed in nearly every centre of his extensive mission journeys. There was indeed a school of teachers in Jerusalem itself; but Gamaliel was of Babylonian origin and Hillel spent the better part of his life and learning in Babylon before he began to teach in Jerusalem. From the Bible itself and from the disappearance29 of Carthaginian, Phoenician and Babylonian national traditions simultaneously30 with the appearance of Jewish communities throughout the western world, communities innocent of Palestinian vines and fig31 trees and very experienced in commerce, I infer this synthetic32 origin of Jewry, Of course, if the reader is a believing Christian, then I suppose the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth at Jerusalem is the cardinal33 event of history. But evidently that crucifixion had to happen somewhere and just as Christian critics can charge me with being obsessed by mere size in my deprecation of Palestine, so I can charge them with being obsessed by mere locality. If the crucifixion has the importance attached to it by orthodox theologians then, unless my reading of theology is all wrong, it must be a universal and eternal and not a temporal and local event.
Moreover nowadays there is a considerable body of quite respectable atheists, theists and variously qualified34 Christians35 who do not find in that practically unquestionable historical event — I throw no doubt upon its actuality — the centre upon which all other events revolve36. There has been a steady enlightenment upon the relations of Christian doctrine37 ceremony and practices to the preceding religions of Egypt, Western Asia and the Mediterranean38, to the Egyptian trinity, to the Goddess Isis, to the blood redemption of Mithraism. In this great assembled fabric39 of symbols and ideas, the simple and subversive40 teachings of the man Jesus who was crucified for sedition41 in Jerusalem, play a not very essential part. Christianity, I imagine, or something very like it, would have come into existence, with all its disputes, divisions, heresies42, protestantism and dissents43, if there had been no Essenes, no Nazarenes and no crucified victim at all. It was a natural outcome of the stresses and confusions that rose from the impact of more barbaric and usually Aryan-speaking eonquerors, upon Egypt and upon the mainly Semitic-speaking civilisations, very much as Greek philosophy and art were the outcome of the parallel impact of the Hellenic peoples upon the Aegean cultural life. Old creeds45 lost their power and old usages their prestige. The temporarily suppressed civilisation44 sought new outlets46. The urgency towards new forms of social and moral statement and adaptation was very great.
It was, I suppose, the advantage of the nexus47 of Semitic communities throughout the western world, that favoured the spread of Judaism and of the semi-Semitic Christianity that grew side by side with it rather than the diffusion48 of Persian religious inventions or Greek science and philosophy. It was an unpremeditated advantage. The thing happened so. And on that basis European mentality49 rests. We are all more or less saturated50 with this legendary51 distortion of historical fact. It makes us a little uncomfortable, we feel a slight shock when it is called in question.
Such is the conception of Jewish and Christian origins that has displaced the distortions of my early Low Church upbringing. It has robbed Palestine of every scrap52 of special significance for me and deprived those gigantic figures of my boyhood, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses of their cosmic importance altogether. They were local celebrities53 of a part of the world in which I have no particular interest. Once they towered to the sky. I want to get them and Palestine out of the way so that our children shall start with a better perspective of the world.
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1
schooling
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n.教育;正规学校教育 | |
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2
initiation
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n.开始 | |
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3
exhorting
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v.劝告,劝说( exhort的现在分词 ) | |
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4
citizenship
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n.市民权,公民权,国民的义务(身份) | |
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pointed
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adj.尖的,直截了当的 | |
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insignificant
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adj.无关紧要的,可忽略的,无意义的 | |
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7
persuasions
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n.劝说,说服(力)( persuasion的名词复数 );信仰 | |
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Christian
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adj.基督教徒的;n.基督教徒 | |
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obsessed
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adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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10
remarkable
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adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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11
testament
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n.遗嘱;证明 | |
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12
slain
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杀死,宰杀,杀戮( slay的过去分词 ); (slay的过去分词) | |
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13
philistine
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n.庸俗的人;adj.市侩的,庸俗的 | |
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naive
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adj.幼稚的,轻信的;天真的 | |
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15
transparent
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adj.明显的,无疑的;透明的 | |
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entirely
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ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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reek
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v.发出臭气;n.恶臭 | |
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dubious
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adj.怀疑的,无把握的;有问题的,靠不住的 | |
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19
bishops
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(基督教某些教派管辖大教区的)主教( bishop的名词复数 ); (国际象棋的)象 | |
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20
mere
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adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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21
pumpkin
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n.南瓜 | |
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22
pumpkins
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n.南瓜( pumpkin的名词复数 );南瓜的果肉,南瓜囊 | |
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23
acquiescence
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n.默许;顺从 | |
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24
diffused
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散布的,普及的,扩散的 | |
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25
anterior
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adj.较早的;在前的 | |
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wail
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vt./vi.大声哀号,恸哭;呼啸,尖啸 | |
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27
consolidating
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v.(使)巩固, (使)加强( consolidate的现在分词 );(使)合并 | |
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controversies
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争论 | |
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29
disappearance
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n.消失,消散,失踪 | |
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30
simultaneously
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adv.同时发生地,同时进行地 | |
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31
fig
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n.无花果(树) | |
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32
synthetic
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adj.合成的,人工的;综合的;n.人工制品 | |
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33
cardinal
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n.(天主教的)红衣主教;adj.首要的,基本的 | |
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34
qualified
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adj.合格的,有资格的,胜任的,有限制的 | |
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35
Christians
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n.基督教徒( Christian的名词复数 ) | |
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36
revolve
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vi.(使)旋转;循环出现 | |
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37
doctrine
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n.教义;主义;学说 | |
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Mediterranean
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adj.地中海的;地中海沿岸的 | |
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39
fabric
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n.织物,织品,布;构造,结构,组织 | |
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subversive
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adj.颠覆性的,破坏性的;n.破坏份子,危险份子 | |
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41
sedition
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n.煽动叛乱 | |
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42
heresies
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n.异端邪说,异教( heresy的名词复数 ) | |
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43
dissents
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意见的分歧( dissent的名词复数 ) | |
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44
civilisation
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n.文明,文化,开化,教化 | |
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45
creeds
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(尤指宗教)信条,教条( creed的名词复数 ) | |
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46
outlets
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n.出口( outlet的名词复数 );经销店;插座;廉价经销店 | |
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47
nexus
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n.联系;关系 | |
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48
diffusion
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n.流布;普及;散漫 | |
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49
mentality
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n.心理,思想,脑力 | |
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50
saturated
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a.饱和的,充满的 | |
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51
legendary
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adj.传奇(中)的,闻名遐迩的;n.传奇(文学) | |
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52
scrap
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n.碎片;废料;v.废弃,报废 | |
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53
celebrities
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n.(尤指娱乐界的)名人( celebrity的名词复数 );名流;名声;名誉 | |
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