Behind the Myths:The Foundations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

536 Pages·2013·2.84 MB·English

by  John Pickard

BEHIND
THE
MYTHS

THE FOUNDATIONS OF JUDAISM,
CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

JOHN PICKARD
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© 2013 by John Pickard. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 02/21/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8362-0 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4817-8363-7 (e) Any people depicted in stock imagery
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Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Technical notes
Glossary
PART I THE FOUNDATIONS OF JUDAISM
Chapter 1 Early myths: Creation, Exodus and Conquest
Chapter 2 The first Israelites
Chapter 3 Class differences in the Israelite state
Chapter 4 Exile and Return
Chapter 5 The Hasmonean dynasty and Rome
PART II THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIANITY
Chapter 6 Christian Tradition and the Evidence
Chapter 7 The Early Christian communities
Chapter 8 The Gospels and the Church Bureaucracy
Chapter 9 ‘Judaism-Lite’
Chapter 10 The Class Basis of the Early Church
Chapter 11 The ‘Conversion’ of Constantine
PART III THE FOUNDATIONS OF ISLAM
Chapter 12 The traditional Story of the Prophet and the
Problem of Sources
Chapter 13 Critique of the Koranic Tradition
Chapter 14 The Revisionist Scholarship
Chapter 15 The early seventh century and the origins of
the Arab Empire
Chapter 16 Abd Al-Malik’s centralised state
Chapter 17 The Class Character of the Arab Empire
Chapter 18 Class Struggle, Civil War and the Abbasid
Revolution
Appendix I The Genesis Enigma
Appendix II Two separate Noah stories
Appendix III The Christian insertions into The
Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, by Josephus
Appendix IV Slavery in ancient Judaism, Christianity
and Islam

Postscript
Bibliography
Introduction

As the twenty first century progresses, there has been an increasing interest and
not a small amount of debate on the role of religion in society, on the rise of
secularisation and on the role of religion in politics. The neo-liberal right wing in
the United States is overwhelmingly supported by fundamentalist Christian
organisations whose support for the billionaire-class is dressed up in the
language of piety and self-righteousness. Internationally, many of the key
political issues of war, revolution and social upheaval are brought into sharp
focus by what appear, on the surface, to be issues of religious faith.
In the UK, Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, was a best-seller and
novels like The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Richard Pullman
touched raw nerves in church hierarchies. Against what they see as a growing
tide of secularism, spokespersons for the Church have denounced the
‘intolerance’ of atheism and have fought a vigorous rearguard action to defend
the special public position for faith, woven into the fabric of everyday life. Faith,
they have argued, is more than a ‘private’ matter and must feature as part of
wider, civil society. Alongside it and as part of the debate, there has been an on-
going argument about Science education and the role that must be assigned to
the story of the ‘Creation’ now propagated in its new guise of ‘Intelligent
Design’. In the United States especially, the extreme neo-conservative Right
allies itself openly and unashamedly to what they see as Christian principles and
draws its inspiration from the Bible as the unerring Word of God.
But if there is a significant weakness in the arguments of many modern
atheists and secularists, it is that their case is presented as if the whole question
of religion is purely an ideological struggle, an intellectual debate in which the
followers of religion are charged with harbouring inferior and inconsistent ideas.
This may indeed be the case, but it is important to see the historic foundation of
these religions—and their continuation within society up to the present day—as
being rooted in material social conditions and not due to intellectual
stubbornness or obtuseness. Religions have not arisen in the past simply because
their new ideas were superior and therefore supplanted the older, inferior ideas.
The fundamental aim of this book is to demonstrate that the origins of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, were each rooted in a specific set of social and economic
conditions at given moments in history. These material conditions were
expressed ideologically—in political, but above all in religion movements. The
new faiths reflected changes in society and politics rather than being their cause.
This is not to suggest that ideas have no place in historical development. Far
from it; as Marx himself pointed out, when an idea gains mass support in
society, it becomes a powerful material force. There is no doubt that in the
history of religious movements—and still today—there have been many, many
examples of individuals who have felt themselves inspired and motivated by
religious fervour. Nor would we doubt that millions take daily comfort from the
pressing problems of everyday life in God or in a spiritual world. But the
sincerity and the passion of their beliefs does not explain for an atheist why ideas
can gain a foothold at particular times in history and not others. School history
books have traditionally focused on kings, queens and rulers and the majority of
historical works today still explain historical developments, including religious
movements, purely within the framework of ideas and charismatic individuals.
This work seeks to redress the balance and focuses instead on real social forces
as the fundamental drivers of history; it argues that the origins of new religious
movements owe more to the national and class conflicts of the day than to
theological clashes or debates about the nature of God. Likewise, in the future, it
will not be ‘defeat’ in debates or ridicule by atheists that will lead to the decline
of religion. It will be from the clashes of social contradictions and class forces
that a new social order will be created within which religion faith and
observance are no longer deemed necessary and after which they will wither
away.
Marx and Engels The economic crash of 2008 has
ushered in a new age of permanent austerity and
social conflict and in parallel with this there has been
a renewed interest in the ideas of Karl Marx and his
collaborator, Friedrich Engels. In economics, politics
and philosophy, there have been a re-examination of
the ideas of the old ‘masters’ and a re-appraisal of
their relevance to the problems of today’s society. It is
in the spirit of their ideas and their basic philosophy
that this book is presented. It aims to describe the
historical roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam—
the so-called ‘Abramic’ faiths—using the method of
historical materialism as it was developed by Marx
and Engels. The two great founders of scientific
socialism based their outlook on a consistently
materialist view, moreover one which they applied to
society and not just to the natural world. “Marx and
I”, Engels wrote, “were pretty well the only people to
rescue conscious dialectics from German idealist
philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception
of nature and history”.1 In The German Ideology, the
fundamental theme of historical materialism was
elaborated by Marx: “The first premise of all human
history is, of course, the existence of living human
individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the
physical organisation of these individuals and their
consequent relation to the rest of nature… . Men can
be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by
religion or anything else you like. They themselves
begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon
as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a
step which is conditioned by their physical
organisation. By producing their means of subsistence
men are indirectly producing their actual material
life”2
In The Introduction to Contribution To The Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of
Right, Marx made specific comments on the role and origin of religion in
society. “Man makes religion”, he wrote, “Religion does not make man”.
“Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either
not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no
abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the
state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-
consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general
theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular
form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction,
its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification.
It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human
essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore
indirectly a fight against the other world of which religion is the spiritual
aroma. Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress
and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a
spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”3
In Anti-Duhring, Engels wrote: “The materialist conception of history starts
from the proposition that the production and, next to production, the exchange of
things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has
appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society
divided into classes or estates is dependent upon what is produced, how it is
produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final
causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in
men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in
changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in
the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing
perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that
reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of
production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social
order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this
it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been
brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition,
within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be
invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the
existing material facts of production.”4
But while Marx and Engels argued for the importance of economic
developments as the fundamental drivers of historical change, they bridled at
what they saw as a crude and simplistic view of historical change, in which
ideas, programmes and political theories were simply a mechanical reflection of
underlying material processes. The interactions, they insisted, were far more
complex. Engels, in a letter to the German social democrat, Bloch, explained his
view and that of Marx: “According to the materialist conception of history, the
ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of
real life. More than that, neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if
somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only
determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract,
senseless phrase.
The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure—political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit:
constitutions established by victorious classes after a successful battle, etc.,
juridical forms and even the reflexes of these actual struggles in the brains
of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views
and their further development into systems of dogmas—also exercise their
influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases
preponderate in determining their form…
There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host
of accidents, the economic element finally asserts itself as necessary.”5
This book makes no claims to be a history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
it looks only at their origins. By using the methods of historical materialism, it is
attempting to make a contribution to explaining the historical foundations of
these three faiths. The fundamental outlook of this work is that while what might
be called the theological considerations may have been important, they were
entirely secondary to the general political, social and economic movements of
the ancient world and it is these latter factors that we have tried to draw out. It
may be that priests, bishops and imams concern themselves with theological
matters; after all, they need to justify their existence. But for the overwhelming
majority of people, the adoption of a religious mantle is above all a social,
political and an economic decision. It remains the case to this day that a person’s
religion, in ninety-nine per cent of cases, is a matter of the national, ethnic,
cultural and family identity into which they were born.
This book makes no apology for taking as a starting point a materialist view.
Even where there are elements of history that are lost in the mists of time—and