Writer and historian Tom Holland investigated the books of St Paul and found a new respect for the ancient letter writer.
When I was six, and went to Sunday School for the first time, I was given a compendium of illustrated Bible stories to flick through. The first page showed Adam and Eve. They stood in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by leopards, eagles, snakes – and a brachiosaur. This confused me. On the one hand, I adored dinosaurs with the intense passion that comes naturally to a certain kind of boy, and so was delighted to discover that sauropods featured in the Bible. On the other, I knew that 65 million years separated the Mesozoic Era from the first appearance of humans. There was absolutely no way that Adam could have met a brachiosaur.
Time passed – but although my dino-mania subsided, I did not lose my taste for things that were large, fierce and extinct. My new obsession was ancient empires: the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Roman. These, unlike dinosaurs, really did have starring roles to play in scripture; and so, sitting in our chilly church alongside my mother, I would pass the service by searching through the Bible for references to Sennacherib or Caesar. Any episode that featured a pharaoh, a plague of boils or a spectacular massacre captured my attention. No less than Greek mythology, I discovered, the Bible was a treasure house of sensational stories.
Except, of course, that I was not being brought up a worshipper of the Greek God Zeus. The confirmation vows I took at the age of thirteen were Anglican. This inevitably complicated my relationship with the Bible. If the God who thought nothing of wiping out 70,000 Israelites because their king had held a census did seem a trifle prone to losing his temper, then it also seemed that he had mellowed with age: certainly, I had no problem with the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. I admired the traditions and beauties of Anglicanism; and in particular, I felt oddly proud that the King James version, the most stirring and influential translation in all English, was somehow ‘mine’. The Bible, in short, was something very precious to me.
But still, as I had been when pondering what a brachiosaur was doing cosying up to Adam and Eve, I was torn. I could not help but look at the Bible through the prism of my intensifying fascination with antiquity – and this in turn obliged me to acknowledge that vast chunks of it were no more history than Homer's The Iliad had been. It was unsettling to realise that there was not a shred of corroborative evidence to suggest that Abraham or Moses had existed; that the biblical accounts of Solomon’s glories bore no relationship to the archaeological record; that the accounts of Jesus' birth and death contained glaring and irrefutable errors. Whatever I might have promised at my confirmation, it was my responsibility as a historian to treat the Bible precisely as I would any other text from antiquity: dispassionately. The demands of writing history would have to trump those of faith.
But does that mean that the Bible has significance only as an ancient text? Hardly. Often, indeed, it is the very attempt to see the Bible through the eyes of those who wrote it that can serve to bring home to us just how completely we continue to stand in its debt. Saint Paul, for instance, is often derided as a misogynist and a homophobe; and yet if there is one thing that making a documentary about him has brought home to me, it is that the ethical and moral presumptions which underlie my own instinctive liberalism would look very different had he never written his letters. Product of antiquity the Bible may be – but it is also, as it has always been, very much more than that.
